Skip to main content
Main

Sauce Piquante

A vinegar-based sauce with garlic, shallots, herbs, spices, stock, butter, flour, and pickled additions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Shallot and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,476 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Sauce Piquante

Ingredients

Directions

Make the reduction

  1. In a saucepan, combine vinegar, garlic, shallots, thyme, bay leaf, pepper, spices, and cayenne. Boil until reduced by half.

  2. Add stock or broth to the mixture.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt butter in another saucepan, mix in a little flour, then add the strained vinegar mixture.

  2. Stir the sauce until it boils.

  3. Add salt, parsley, gherkins, and capers to the sauce before serving.

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. Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

  4. Garlic + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,608 recipes

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

  5. Garlic + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity that gives the piquant flavour, concentrated by reduction.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, adding richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with the butter, forming a roux that gives body.
Stock or broth
Adds savoury depth and liquid volume to the reduced vinegar base.

The step that matters

Boil the vinegar mixture until reduced by half. Reducing the vinegar concentrates its acidity and aromatics. Stopping early leaves the sauce sharp and thin, while the flavours of the garlic, shallots and herbs need time to infuse.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, clove, shallot, thyme, pepper, egg, butter):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, clove, shallot, thyme, pepper, egg, butter. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes