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Sauce

Piquante Sauce

A sauce made with parsley, capers, mustard, egg yolks, anchovies, vinegar, oil, shallot, and melted butter or beef gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 405 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Piquante Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a mortar, combine parsley leaves and capers; beat together.

  2. Add fresh mustard and hard-boiled egg yolks; mix well.

  3. Incorporate the anchovies through a sieve.

  4. Stir in vinegar, oil, and chopped shallot; mix thoroughly.

Serve

  1. When ready to use, stir the sauce into melted butter or beef gravy.

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. Capers + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together405 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Capers + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Mustard + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together859 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 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

Hard-boiled egg yolks
Their fat and emulsifying proteins help bind the sauce into a smooth, thick paste.
Anchovies
They add a deep, salty savoury flavour that gives the sauce its character.
Capers
They add a sharp, briny acidity that brightens the rich sauce.
Fresh mustard
Its sharp pungency adds heat and helps emulsify the sauce.

The step that matters

Incorporating the oil and vinegar. Adding oil and vinegar to the yolk paste must be done thoroughly so the mixture emulsifies smoothly rather than separating into greasy droplets. Mixing well distributes the fat evenly through the sauce.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Dillfits about as well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against capers, mustard, egg, vinegar, shallot, 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.

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