Skip to main content
Sauce

Piquant Sauce

A tangy sauce made with capers, shallots, gherkins, vinegar, broth, Bovril, anchovy essence, and a brown thickening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Piquant Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine capers, shallots, gherkins, pepper, and vinegar in a saucepan.

  2. Simmer gently for 3 minutes.

  3. Add broth, Bovril, anchovy essence, and brown thickening.

  4. Boil until thick and smooth.

  5. Skim carefully.

  6. The sauce is ready for use.

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 + anchovytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together473 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

  4. Shallot + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Capers + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Capers
Provide a sharp, briny bite that brightens the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and balances the richness.
Broth or stock
Forms the liquid base that the sauce is built on.
Brown thickening
Thickens the sauce so it becomes smooth and coats the spoon.

The step that matters

Boil until thick and smooth. The thickening is starch or flour-and-butter, which must be fully cooked and dispersed to thicken evenly and lose its raw floury taste. Stirring keeps lumps from forming.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Shallotthe original
  2. Mustardfits about as well
  3. Chivefits less well
  4. Lettucefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against capers, pepper, vinegar, anchovy, 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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes