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Sauce

Celery Sauce

A thick sauce made from celery, cauliflower, red peppers, flour, mustard, turmeric, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and turmeric match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 514 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the celery, cauliflower, and red peppers finely.

Make the sauce

  1. In a large pot, mix the flour, mustard, and turmeric powder with the vinegar.

  2. Add the chopped vegetables to the pot.

  3. Boil the mixture for one hour.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the sauce like ketchup.

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. Cauliflower + turmerictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together514 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cauliflower + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together687 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Mustard + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Celery + turmerictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells and sets when boiled.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that gives the sauce its sharp, tangy flavour.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that stands up to the vinegar.
Turmeric powder
Gives the sauce its yellow colour and an earthy aroma.
Celery
Contributes vegetable body and a savoury celery flavour once cooked down.
Cauliflower
Softens during boiling to add body and texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Mix the flour fully into the vinegar before boiling. Flour clumps if it is not dispersed in liquid first. Once heated, its starch thickens the whole pot, so lumps set into the sauce and are hard to remove later.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cauliflower, pepper, flour, mustard, turmeric, vinegar):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Cuminfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cauliflower, pepper, flour, mustard, turmeric, 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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