Skip to main content
Sauce

Cream' Sauce

A simple sauce made from heavy cream, butter, sugar, and optional flavoring.

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

Why it works: Cream and butter 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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the cream in a saucepan.

  2. Thicken it slightly.

  3. Stir in the butter until melted.

  4. Sweeten with sugar to taste.

Finish

  1. Allow to cool, then 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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Butter + sugartop 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

Heavy cream
Forms the body of the sauce and thickens as it reduces by boiling.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety mouthfeel to the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the richness of the cream and butter.

The step that matters

Thicken it slightly. Cream thickens as water evaporates during gentle boiling, but overheating can cause it to scorch or separate. Watch closely and stop once it coats a spoon lightly.

“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 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes