Skip to main content
Main

Sauce Tournke

A sauce made from beef or veal broth, butter, flour, onions, parsley, allspice, and optional mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,289 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sauce Tournke

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the broth in a quart saucepan.

  2. Melt the butter in another saucepan.

  3. Add flour to the melted butter to form a stiff paste and stir until well mixed without browning.

  4. Combine the paste with the broth and stir until smooth.

  5. Season with onions, parsley, allspice, and mushrooms if using.

  6. Cover and simmer gently for 1 hour.

  7. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve.

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. Parsley + allspicetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  4. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the butter and broth into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Butter
Carries the flour into a paste and adds richness to the sauce.
Beef or veal broth
Forms the liquid base and provides the main savory beef flavor.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour paste without browning. Stirring the flour into melted butter just until well mixed keeps it pale and avoids a toasted, nutty taste. Adding the broth gradually to the paste then helps prevent lumps, so the sauce stays smooth.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, flour, onion, parsley, mushroom):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, flour, onion, parsley, mushroom. 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

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes