Skip to main content
Sauce

Hot Sauce

A sweet butter sauce made with powdered sugar and boiling water, flavored with nutmeg or lemon essence.

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

Why it works: Butter and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 24,377 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Hot Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the butter and powdered sugar together until frothy, using a hand or wooden spoon.

  2. Gradually pour in the boiling water while stirring briskly.

  3. Serve the sauce over grated nutmeg or lemon essence immediately.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Provides fat for richness and a smooth, creamy texture in the sauce.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves quickly, helping the mixture beat up light and frothy.
Boiling water
Loosens the creamed mixture into a pourable sauce and partly melts the butter.

The step that matters

Pouring in the boiling water. Adding the hot water gradually while stirring briskly helps it blend evenly into the butter and sugar. Pouring it in all at once can leave the fat separated or the sauce lumpy.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Gingerfits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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 hot sauce recipes

for Meats 4 See all 8 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes