Skip to main content
Sauce

Genoa Sauce

A sauce made from anchovies, capers, garlic, curry powder, mustard flour, marsala, caper vinegar, water, baked flour, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Capers and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 624 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Genoa Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Pound the anchovies, capers, garlic, curry powder, and mustard flour in a mortar until smooth.

  2. Moisten the mixture with marsala, caper vinegar, and cold water.

  3. Transfer to a saucepan and heat.

Make the thickening

  1. Knead baked flour with butter until smooth.

Finish the sauce

  1. Skim the sauce, stir in the thickening, and boil for 10 minutes.

  2. Strain the sauce 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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Capers + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Capers + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together834 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Garlic + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Capers + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Dissolve into the sauce to give it a deep, savoury flavour base.
Baked flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated with the butter and liquid.
Butter
Binds with the baked flour and adds richness and a smooth, silky body.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny acidity that brightens the sauce.
Marsala
Adds wine acidity and a rich, fortified aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the thickening and boil. Kneaded flour and butter must be stirred in smoothly so no lumps form; the starch then needs to boil to fully thicken and lose its raw flour taste.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (capers, garlic, flour, mustard, vinegar, butter):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against capers, garlic, flour, mustard, vinegar, butter. 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.

You might also like

Mixed MustardMixed Mustard9 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes