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Sauce

Foamy Sauce

A sweet sauce made with butter, powdered sugar, vanilla, sherry wine, boiling water, and foamy egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sherry and vanilla work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry piperonal, which smells bitter, coconut. The science ↓

Foamy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cream the butter and powdered sugar together.

  2. Add the vanilla and sherry wine, mixing well.

  3. Just before serving, stir in the boiling water.

  4. Gently fold in the beaten egg white until foamy.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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. Sherry + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

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

  3. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  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
Adds richness and body, and creaming it with sugar traps air for a lighter texture.
Powdered sugar
Provides sweetness and dissolves smoothly into the butter for a fine, creamy texture.
Boiling water
Adds moisture and loosens the mixture so it pours easily.
Egg white
Its beaten foam adds lightness and a frothy texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg white gently. Beaten egg white is a foam of air bubbles held in place by proteins. Stirring or beating it vigorously knocks out that trapped air, so the sauce turns flat and dense instead of light and foamy.

“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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