Skip to main content
Main

Sauce Piquante

A pickled fruit sauce made with mangoes or apricots, onions, raisins, garlic, salt, ginger, sugar, lime juice, chillies, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Sauce Piquante

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pound the green mangoes or apricots, onions, raisins, garlic, coarse sea salt, ginger, and sugar well.

  2. Add the vinegar and lime juice.

Steep in the sun

  1. Close the jar tightly.

  2. Expose it to the sun for one month, shaking and stirring it well every day.

Strain and bottle

  1. After a month, strain the mixture into bottles.

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 + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Mango + limetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Ginger + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,621 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Mango + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together280 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Garlic + gingertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Green mangoes or apricots
Provides the fruity base and tartness that the sauce is built around.
Vinegar
Acts as the main preserving liquid and adds sharp acidity.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar and lime juice with sweetness.
Raisins
Add sweetness and body as they soften during the long steep.
Lime juice
Adds bright acidity that supports the vinegar.

The step that matters

Closing the jar tightly during the month in the sun. A tightly sealed jar keeps air and contaminants out during the long fermenting and steeping period, while the acid and salt help keep the mixture stable. Loose closure risks spoilage.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mango, onion, garlic, ginger, sugar, lime, vinegar):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mango, onion, garlic, ginger, sugar, lime, vinegar. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes