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Sauce

Hot Liquid Sauce

A simple hot sauce made by creaming sugar and butter, thickening with cornstarch, and adding boiling water and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Hot Liquid Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cream the sugar and butter together.

  2. Blend the cornstarch with a little water.

  3. Add the cornstarch mixture to the creamed sugar and butter.

  4. Pour in enough boiling water to thicken the sauce, stirring slightly.

  5. Add your choice of flavoring.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides sweetness and, creamed with butter, bulk for the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps cream the sugar into a smooth base.
Cornstarch
Thickens the sauce as it heats in the boiling water, giving it body.

The step that matters

Pour in the boiling water gradually. Cornstarch thickens only when heated and hydrated, so adding boiling water a little at a time while stirring lets the starch swell evenly without lumps or an overly thick, pasty sauce.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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