Skip to main content
Sauce

Cream Sauce. No. 1. Aunt Hettie

A butter and powdered sugar cream sauce flavored with wine or vanilla and thickened with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cream Sauce. No. 1. Aunt Hettie

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the butter until creamy.

  2. Gradually add the powdered sugar while continuing to beat.

  3. Once light and creamy, slowly add the wine (or vanilla) and then the cream a little at a time. Continue beating until smooth.

  4. Place the bowl in a basin of hot water and stir until the sauce is smooth and creamy, which will take only a few minutes.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Cream + winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Provides fat and richness, and creaming it traps air for a light, smooth texture.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves smoothly into the creamed butter.
Cream
Adds moisture and loosens the sauce to a smooth, pourable consistency.
Wine or vanilla
Adds aroma and flavour that balances the sweetness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the liquid slowly. Adding wine or cream a little at a time lets the butter and sugar absorb it evenly. Adding it all at once can cause the emulsion to split, leaving a grainy or curdled 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.

More cream sauce recipes

Whipped 47for Fish 21Mushroom 19Fish 18Lemon 18Horseradish 16 See all 209 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesWine Sauce for Sweet PuddingsWine Sauce for Sweet Puddings6 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes