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Dessert

Fruit Hard Sauce

A thickened strawberry sauce made with butter, powdered sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fruit Hard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  2. Gradually beat in the powdered sugar.

  3. Add fully ripe strawberries, crushed, one at a time, until the sauce is well colored and flavored.

  4. Stir in a little lemon juice to enhance the flavor, if desired.

  5. If the sauce curdles, beat in slightly more sugar.

Serve

  1. Arrange the sauce on a serving dish and chill until firm before serving.

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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Provides fat and richness, giving the sauce its creamy body.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps it become smooth and stable when creamed with butter.
Strawberries
Supply fruit flavor, color, and moisture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the strawberries. Fat and sugar can separate or curdle when liquid is added too quickly. Adding crushed strawberries one at a time and beating well between additions keeps the emulsion smooth.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar. 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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