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Glite Dictionary
hard sauce

hard sauce

6.3
A sweet creamy mix of butter and sugar often flavored with brandy and served with warm pudding
  • noun
  • /hɑrd sɔs/
  • UK
translation icon : salsa dura
  • The menu for the noon meal is baked chicken, roast beef, mashed potatoes, vegetables, cannonballs and hard sauce.
  • brown-butter hard sauce

Examples

  • He served the chocolate lava cake with a dollop of hard sauce infused with vanilla.

  • Ain't you got that hard sauce fixed yet for the suet pudding?

    Fiction book (1994)

  • My mom is from the Philly area, and she added the hard sauce, but both sides ate it.

    Blog text (28)

  • The chef prepared a rich hard sauce to accompany the warm bread pudding.

  • After baking the cake, she drizzled a homemade hard sauce over the top for sweetness.

Surface Forms

hard sauce singular
hard sauces plural

Morphology

hard + sauce

The literal meanings of 'hard' (firm) and 'sauce' (a liquid condiment) do not transparently yield a sweet, buttery dessert topping—the phrase is not compositionally predictable from its parts. The name is historically/culturally conditioned (possibly relating to alcoholic 'hard' or a regional culinary term), which a B1 learner who only knows the basic words would not infer, so the expression functions as an idiomatic culinary label.

Etymology

Hard sauce may come from a simple kitchen picture: cooks make a sweet block of flavored butter that is hard when cold. Put it on hot pudding and it melts into a rich sauce, so the name shows a firm topping becomes a 'sauce' when warmed.