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Haslet Sauce for Roast Pig

A savory sauce made from pig parts, butter, flour, herbs, and Madeira wine, simmered until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Marjoram and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,979 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Haslet Sauce for Roast Pig

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meats

  1. Scald the tongue and remove the skin.

  2. Clean the feet, liver, and heart, then place them in a saucepan with 1 pint of water and a little salt.

  3. Boil until tender, then chop finely and return to the saucepan with the cooking water.

Make the sauce

  1. Mince the onion, sweet marjoram, and parsley, and add to the saucepan.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix 1 teaspoon of flour into 1 ounce of butter, then stir into the sauce.

  3. Season with cayenne pepper and additional salt if needed, then boil together.

Finish and serve

  1. Before serving, add ½ cup of Madeira wine and serve hot.

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. Marjoram + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,979 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Marjoram + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and richness, and carries the flour smoothly into the liquid.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it mixes with butter and cooking liquid, giving it body.
Madeira wine
Adds a sweet, fortified aroma and flavour when added at the end.
Onion
Adds savoury depth and aromatic sweetness as it cooks into the liquid.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour into the butter before stirring into the sauce. Flour mixed directly into hot liquid can clump into lumps. Blending it with butter first coats the starch grains so they disperse evenly and thicken smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, marjoram, parsley, butter, flour, pepper, madeira wine):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, marjoram, parsley, butter, flour, pepper, madeira wine. 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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