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Sauce

Superlative Sauce

A sauce made by combining wine, ketchup, pickle liquor, anchovies, lemon peel, shallots, horseradish, spices, and celery seed, then shaking and straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Superlative Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine all ingredients in a wide-mouthed bottle.

  2. Seal the bottle tightly and shake it every day for two weeks.

  3. Strain the mixture. Optionally, add ¼ pint of soy or thick browning for extra flavor.

Serve

  1. Use this sauce with fish, game, poultry, or ragouts.

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. Shallot + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mushroom + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Horseradish + allspicetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Walnut + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Claret or port wine
Adds acidity and fruity depth that carries the sauce's savory flavors.
Mushroom ketchup
Supplies concentrated savory, umami flavor as the sauce's main base.
Anchovies
Dissolve during steeping to add deep salty, savory richness without a distinct fishy taste.
Shallots
Release mild aromatic sweetness and onion-like notes during the long steep.
Horseradish
Contributes sharp, pungent heat that mellows somewhat over time.

The step that matters

Shaking the bottle daily for two weeks. Regular agitation keeps the ingredients evenly mixed so flavors extract uniformly from the solids into the liquid. Skipping it can leave the sauce unevenly flavored.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (port wine, mushroom, ketchup, walnut, shallot, horseradish, allspice):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, mushroom, ketchup, walnut, shallot, horseradish, allspice. 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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