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Sauce

A Sauce for Cold Meats

A sauce made with eggs, acid jelly, mustard, vinegar, butter, and cucumber pickle for serving with cold meats.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,281 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

A Sauce for Cold Meats

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the eggs, leaving out one white.

  2. Cut the acid jelly into small pieces.

  3. Mix the flour, mustard, and a little vinegar together.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the egg mixture, jelly, butter, and vinegar.

  2. Boil the mixture while stirring constantly until it thickens.

  3. Allow to cool, then mix in the finely chopped cucumber pickle.

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. Mustard + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + cucumbertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Eggs
Thicken the sauce as they cook and set, giving it body.
Acid jelly
Adds tartness and flavour to the sauce base.
Flour
Stabilises the sauce and helps it thicken without breaking.
Butter
Adds richness and a smoother, rounder mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness.

The step that matters

Boil while stirring constantly until it thickens. Egg proteins set when heated, so the sauce can curdle or turn lumpy if it boils unevenly or is left unstirred. Constant stirring spreads the heat and keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, mustard, vinegar, butter, sauce. 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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