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Sauce

Burnt Cream Sauce

A sauce made by caramelising sugar and adding thin cream or milk and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Burnt Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Put the caster sugar into a small saucepan.

  2. Stir the sugar over the fire until it turns dark brown.

  3. Slowly pour in the thin cream (or milk and cream) while stirring.

  4. Continue stirring until the cream is hot.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce into a sauceboat and serve.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Caster sugar
Caramelizes to a dark brown, giving the sauce its bittersweet, toasty flavour.
Thin cream
Adds richness and body, and its fat rounds out the sharp caramel.

The step that matters

Stir the sugar until dark brown. Sugar caramelizes quickly once it melts and can go from amber to bitter and burnt within seconds. Constant stirring keeps it heating evenly, and the cream must then be added slowly because hot caramel can spatter and seize.

“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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