Name: Hard Sauce
Ingredients: ½ cup butter; 1 cup powdered sugar; Flavoring of choice (e.g., 3 tablespoons wine, 1 teaspoon lemon or vanilla extract, or rind and juice of 1 fresh lemon)

Why it works: Butter and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,645 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Hard Sauce

Ingredients

½ cup butter
1 cup powdered sugar
Flavoring of choice (e.g., 3 tablespoons wine, 1 teaspoon lemon or vanilla extract, or rind and juice of 1 fresh lemon)

Directions

Make the sauce

Beat the butter until creamy.
Gradually add the powdered sugar while continuing to beat.
Incorporate your chosen flavoring gradually.

Serve

Once finished, heap the sauce lightly on a serving dish.
Refrigerate until needed.

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.

Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,645 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Sugar + winetop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together9,581 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter: Provides fat that whips into a creamy, smooth base for the sauce.
Powdered sugar: Dissolves into the fat to add sweetness and a fine, smooth texture.

“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.