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Sauce

Mint Sauce

A sauce made from fresh spearmint, vinegar, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Spearmint and cider work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Mint Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mint

  1. Strip the fresh spearmint leaves from the stems and wash or dry them on a cloth.

  2. Chop the mint leaves very fine and place them in a gravy boat.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the chopped mint with the white sugar and let it stand for a few minutes.

  2. Pour the vinegar over the mint mixture and let it sit to extract the flavor.

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. Spearmint + cidertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Cider + sugartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Spearmint + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh spearmint leaves
Provide the main aroma and flavor of the sauce.
White sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Cider or white wine vinegar
Adds acidity and draws flavor out of the chopped mint.

The step that matters

Letting the mint sit in the vinegar. Mint flavor is released slowly into the acid and sugar. Sitting gives the vinegar time to extract the aromatic oils and dissolve the sugar, so a rushed sauce tastes weak and harsh.

Swap the spearmint

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Spearmintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, 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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