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Sauce

To Make White Sauce for Fowls

A creamy sauce made from veal, fowl neck, mutton, spices, and cream, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,467 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Make White Sauce for Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. In a saucepan, combine veal, neck of fowl, mutton bits, mace, peppercorns, anchovy, celery, sweet herbs, lemon slice, and water.

  2. Cover and boil until reduced to half a pint.

Thicken and finish

  1. Strain the mixture and thicken with butter mixed with flour; boil for 5-6 minutes.

  2. Add pickled mushrooms, egg yolks mixed with cream, and nutmeg to the sauce.

  3. Stir over low heat, ensuring it does not boil.

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. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  2. Mutton + anchovytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Anchovy + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Veal + anchovytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together456 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the strained stock into a sauce when cooked with the butter.
Egg yolks
Add richness and further thicken the sauce as they gently heat.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the finished sauce.
Pickled mushrooms
Add a tangy, savoury flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir over low heat, ensuring it does not boil. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat; if the sauce boils, the yolks can scramble and curdle, leaving the sauce grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, mutton, anchovy, celery, lemon, butter, flour):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, mutton, anchovy, celery, lemon, butter, flour. 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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