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Sauce Genevoise

A rich French sauce made with onions, shallots, wine, espagnole, veal stock, truffles, and anchovy butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Sauce Genevoise

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt butter in a pan and sauté onions and shallots until browned.

  2. Add garlic, red wine, and bouquet garni; simmer until onions are cooked.

  3. Stir in espagnole sauce and blond veal stock; reduce until sauce coats back of spoon.

  4. Skim off impurities and strain sauce through fine sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Bring sauce to a boil just before serving.

  2. Stir in chopped truffles and anchovy butter.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Shallot + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Shallot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Onions
Sweetness and savory depth as they brown in the butter.
Espagnole sauce
Forms the body of the sauce, giving it thickness and a rich base.
Red burgundy wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth that balances the rich sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor, and helps the onions brown.
Blond veal stock
Adds savory gelatin and body, helping the sauce coat the spoon.

The step that matters

Reducing the sauce until it coats the back of a spoon. Reduction concentrates flavor and thickens the sauce through evaporation. Stopping too early leaves it thin, while reducing too far makes it salty and heavy, so the cook should test by coating the back of a spoon.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, shallot, pepper, garlic, butter, wine, sauce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, shallot, pepper, garlic, butter, wine, sauce. 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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