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Beown Sauce

A savory sauce made with brown stock, vegetables, flour, butter, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Beown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook the vegetables in the butter for 15 minutes.

  2. Add the flour and cook until brown like a chestnut.

  3. Remove from heat and let cool slightly.

  4. Gradually add the stock and then the seasoning.

  5. Simmer the sauce on one side for 20 minutes.

  6. Skim off the fat, strain, and serve.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fat that cooks the vegetables and combines with the flour to form the roux.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and stock.
Brown stock
Provides the liquid base and main savory flavour of the sauce.
Carrots
Add sweetness and aromatic flavour as they cook in the butter.
Onions
Add aromatic flavour and depth as they cook in the butter.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour until brown like a chestnut. Browning the flour in the fat develops nutty, colour and flavour in the roux. Stopping too early leaves a pale, raw-tasting sauce, while going too far can scorch it and make it bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, flour, lemon, butter, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, flour, lemon, butter, pepper. 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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