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Mustard Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, flour, stock, tarragon vinegar, and English and French mustards.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 901 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Mustard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and cook until browned.

  3. Pour in the stock and tarragon vinegar, stirring well.

  4. Mix in the mustards and simmer for 1-2 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce warm.

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. Tarragon + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + tarragontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together788 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Melts to form the fat base that the flour is cooked into.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and stock.
Stock
Forms the liquid body of the sauce.
English mustard
Adds sharp, pungent heat and flavour to the sauce.
French mustard
Adds milder tang and flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour until browned. Flour must be cooked in the butter long enough to lose its raw taste, but if it browns too far it can taste bitter and it will not thicken as well. Stirring keeps it from scorching.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Mustardthe original
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Beetrootfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, tarragon, vinegar. 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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