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Sauce

Plain Cold Hard Sauce

A cold, hard sauce made from sugar, butter, flavoring, and beaten egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Plain Cold Hard Sauce

Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Plain Cold Hard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, stir together the white sugar and butter until creamy and light.

  2. Add flavoring to taste, such as the juice of raspberries or strawberries.

  3. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg white gently.

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 + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

White sugar
Sweetens the sauce and, creamed with butter, helps it turn light and smooth.
Butter
Adds richness and creaminess, and creaming it with sugar traps air for a lighter texture.
Egg white
Whipped and folded in, it adds airy volume to the sauce.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg white. Stiffly beaten egg white holds air bubbles that give the sauce its lightness. Stirring it vigorously deflates those bubbles, so fold it in gently and keep the mixture airy.

“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.

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