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Hot Coffee Sauce for Ice Cream

A sweet coffee-based sauce thickened into syrup for topping ice cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Hot Coffee Sauce for Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the sugar and cream in a saucepan for five minutes with a pinch of salt.

  2. Add the strong black coffee and boil for ten minutes, or until it thickens into a syrup.

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).

  2. Cream + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Sugar + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 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

Sugar
Provides sweetness and, as it dissolves and concentrates, body for the syrup.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the syrup a smoother, rounder texture.
Strong black coffee
Supplies the coffee flavour and liquid that reduces into the syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the coffee down to a syrup. Boiling evaporates water and concentrates the sugar, so the mixture thickens as it cools. Stopping too early leaves a thin sauce, while boiling too long can scorch the sugar and make it bitter.

“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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