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Dessert

Hard Sauce

A thick butter and sugar sauce flavored with vanilla or rum, finished with beaten egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Vanilla and rum work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 728 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Hard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cream the softened butter in a bowl.

  2. Gradually add the sugar while beating thoroughly.

  3. Incorporate your chosen flavoring.

  4. Chill the sauce slightly before serving.

  5. Just before serving, fold in the beaten egg white.

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. Vanilla + rumtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together728 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Butter + rumtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,007 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + rumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

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

  5. Butter + vanillatop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,050 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Butter
Creamed with sugar to form a smooth, rich base for the sauce.
Sugar
Beaten into the butter to add sweetness and help give the sauce a light, creamy texture.
Egg white
Folded in just before serving to lighten the sauce's texture.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg white just before serving. Folding gently keeps the air in the beaten egg white. Stirring it in vigorously or too early can deflate it and make the sauce dense.

“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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