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Sauce

Piquant Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, onions, flour, soup stock, herbs, cayenne pepper, vinegar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 9,057 recipes mention both. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Piquant Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the chopped onions and stir for 2 minutes.

  3. Sprinkle the flour over the onions and stir to prevent lumps.

  4. Pour in the soup stock, then add the parsley, thyme, bay leaf, and cayenne pepper.

  5. Simmer gently for 20 minutes, then remove the herbs.

  6. Stir in the vinegar and add salt to taste.

  7. Bring to a boil and serve.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together11,585 recipes

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

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together25,843 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

Butter
Adds richness and carries the flavour of the onions into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Soup stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the sauce.
Cayenne pepper
Adds heat that gives the sauce its piquant character.

The step that matters

Sprinkle the flour over the onions and stir to prevent lumps. Flour added to hot fat and stirred constantly coats the starch granules so they disperse evenly. Dumping it in unstirred or into liquid clumps, leaving a lumpy sauce that cannot be fully smoothed later.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, parsley, thyme, pepper, vinegar):

  1. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  2. Parsnipbetter flavor fit
  3. Carrotbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, parsley, thyme, pepper, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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