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Sauce

Brown Walnut Sauce

A savory sauce made with browned fat, flour, brown stock, walnuts, chutney, pickles, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Brown Walnut Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the walnut mixture

  1. Sauté 2 ounces of walnut meats in enough butter to prevent burning.

  2. Mix ¾ tablespoon chutney, 1½ tablespoons chopped pickles, ⅔ tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, ¼ teaspoon salt, and a few grains of cayenne.

  3. Pour the mixture over the nuts and heat thoroughly.

Make the sauce

  1. Pour off ¼ cup fat from the frying pan.

  2. Add 5 tablespoons flour and stir until well browned.

  3. Gradually pour in 1¼ cups brown stock while stirring constantly.

  4. Once boiling, add the nut mixture.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Walnut + peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,039 recipes

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

  4. Walnut + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,035 recipes

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

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Browned in the fat, it thickens the stock into a smooth, rich sauce.
Walnut meats
Provide the nutty flavour and a chewy bite in the finished sauce.
Brown stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries its savoury flavour.
Fat from frying pan
Carries the browning of the flour and adds richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the flour until well browned. Cooking the flour in fat toasts its starch and builds nutty colour and flavour. Stirring prevents scorching on the pan, and the browned roux thickens the stock more evenly when it is added.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, meat, butter, sauce, pepper):

  1. Almondfits about as well
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Beansfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, meat, butter, sauce, pepper. 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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