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Madeira Sauce, with Chestnuts

A savory sauce made with chestnut flour, butter, stock, lemon, nutmeg, and Madeira wine, served over vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Madeira Sauce, with Chestnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub chestnuts through a sieve to make 2 tablespoons of chestnut flour.

  2. In a saucepan, melt 1 ounce of butter.

Make the sauce

  1. Add ½ teaspoon of salt and ¼ teaspoon of pepper.

  2. Pour in enough brown stock to achieve the consistency of ordinary brown sauce.

  3. Flavor the sauce with a squeeze of lemon and a dash of nutmeg.

  4. Stir in ⅓ cup of cooking sherry or Madeira.

  5. Pour the sauce around the vegetable.

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

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

  2. Chestnut + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together180 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Chestnut + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together517 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 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

Chestnut flour
Thickens the sauce and adds a nutty, earthy flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries the flavour of the sauce.
Brown stock
Provides the liquid base and savoury depth of the sauce.
Cooking sherry or madeira
Adds acidity and aromatic sweetness to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the sherry or Madeira. Wine is added to a sauce already thickened by flour; adding it too early or boiling hard can drive off its aroma and make the flavour harsh, so it is best stirred in near the end.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chestnut, flour, butter, pepper, nutmeg, sherry):

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Vanillafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chestnut, flour, butter, pepper, nutmeg, sherry. 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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