Skip to main content
Dessert

Marshmallow Sauce

A sweet sauce made from brown sugar, water, marshmallows, and vanilla.

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

Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Marshmallow Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the brown sugar and water for 20 minutes.

  2. Add the finely cut marshmallows and beat to a cream.

  3. When slightly cool, stir in the vanilla.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or cold.

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 + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Brown sugar
Dissolves into the boiled water to form a sweet, caramel-flavoured syrup.
Marshmallows
Melt into the hot syrup and give the sauce a smooth, creamy, light body.
Vanilla
Adds a rounded aroma that complements the sugar.

The step that matters

Stir in the vanilla once slightly cool. Vanilla's aromatic compounds are volatile and partly evaporate at high heat. Adding it when the sauce has cooled slightly keeps more of its fragrance in the finished 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.

You might also like

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes