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Mustard Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, flour, onion, stock, lemon rind, salt, cayenne, vinegar, mustard, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Mustard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

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

  2. Add the flour and stir until smooth.

  3. Add the sliced onion and stock.

  4. Add the lemon rind, salt, cayenne, and vinegar.

  5. Let the mixture simmer for 15 minutes.

  6. Mix the mustard with a little water until smooth.

  7. Add the mustard mixture to the pan.

  8. Boil the sauce together until smooth.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lemon + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Butter + flourtop 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).

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
Enriches the sauce and adds richness to the roux base.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Mustard
Provides the sharp, pungent flavour that defines the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the mustard.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter until smooth. Flour must be cooked briefly in the fat and stirred well, or it forms lumps when liquid is added and the sauce will not thicken evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Cherryfits better
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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