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Cream Sauce

A simple lemon-flavored cream sauce made with butter, sugar, and optional nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Cream Sauce

Why it works: Walnut and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,230 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the cream in a saucepan.

  2. Thicken the cream slightly.

  3. Add the butter and sugar, stirring until combined.

Cool and flavour

  1. Let the mixture cool.

  2. Add the grated or sliced lemon and nutmeg if desired.

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. Walnut + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 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

Cream
Thickens on gentle boiling and provides the rich, fatty body of the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon
Contributes acidity and aromatic citrus oils from the rind and juice.

The step that matters

Thicken the cream slightly. Cream boils over quickly and keeps thickening as it reduces. Stopping early keeps the sauce pourable, while over-reducing makes it heavy and dense as it cools.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, walnut, butter, sugar, lemon):

  1. Nutmegthe original
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Tarragonfits less well
  4. Parsleyfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, walnut, butter, sugar, lemon. 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.

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