Skip to main content
Sauce

Spanish Sauce

A savory sauce made with carrots, onion, bacon or sausage drippings, herbs, and broth, simmered and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Spanish Sauce

Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Spanish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. In a pot, cook the carrots and onion in the bacon or sausage drippings until softened.

  2. Add the thyme, bay leaf, peppers, clove, parsley, and celery (or celery seed).

Simmer and finish

  1. Pour in the weak white broth and simmer gently for 30 minutes.

  2. Add enough strong brown stock to make 4 quarts and boil slowly for 3 hours.

  3. If available, add any bones from roast veal or ham.

  4. Strain the sauce and store it for future use.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Add sweetness and aromatic flavour as they soften in the fat.
Onion
Builds savoury depth as it softens and browns slightly in the drippings.
Bacon or sausage drippings
Carries the aromatics and adds rich, savoury fat flavour.
Strong brown stock
Provides body and concentrated meaty flavour as it reduces during the long simmer.
Weak white broth
Forms the liquid base that the vegetables and herbs flavour over the simmer.

The step that matters

Long, slow boil after adding the brown stock. Boiling slowly for 3 hours reduces and concentrates the liquid and gives the sauce its body. A hard, fast boil can make it cloudy and over-reduced, so keep the heat gentle and the liquid moving only slightly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, thyme, pepper, clove, parsley, celery, veal):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, thyme, pepper, clove, parsley, celery, veal. 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

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes