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Spanish Sauce

A sauce made from boiled red peppers, salt, vinegar, lemon juice, olive oil, and olives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Spanish Sauce

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Spanish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peppers

  1. Place cleaned peppers in a porcelain or granite kettle and cover with boiling water.

  2. Add ½ cup coarse sea salt.

  3. Boil until the peppers are tender.

  4. Drain the peppers.

  5. Chop the peppers into a fine pulp.

  6. Press the pulp through a sieve into a non-metal dish.

Make the sauce

  1. Return the mixture to the stove.

  2. Add vinegar to taste.

  3. Boil thoroughly.

  4. Adjust consistency with water if too thick.

  5. Bottle and seal while hot.

  6. Mix in the juice of 1 lemon and 1 tablespoon olive oil.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over thinly sliced cold meats.

  2. Add olives.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Vinegar + olivetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,297 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  4. Pepper + olivetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,263 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Red peppers
Form the main body of the sauce as a fine pulp.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the peppers and draws out moisture during soaking.
Vinegar
Adds sharpness that balances the sweetness of the cooked peppers.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and brightness to the finished sauce.
Olive oil
Adds fat, smoothness and a rounder mouthfeel to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil thoroughly after adding vinegar. Thorough boiling concentrates the sauce and reduces the sharp raw taste of vinegar. Hot, well-boiled sauce sealed while hot keeps better in the bottle, so the boil should not be rushed.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, vinegar, olive):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, vinegar, olive. 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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