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Sauce

Reading Sauce

A sauce made by boiling shallots, walnut pickle, water, soy, anchovy, spices, and bay leaves, then straining and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 859 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Reading Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the base

  1. Combine bruised shallots and walnut pickle in a large earthen jar.

  2. Place jar in a 400°F (200°C) oven and boil until reduced to 2 pints.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix water, Indian soy, pounded anchovy, black pepper, ginger, mustard seed, and cayenne in another jar.

  2. Place jar in oven and boil for 1 hour.

  3. Pour contents of first jar into second jar.

  4. Stir mixture well.

  5. Boil mixture for 30 minutes.

  6. Cover jar tightly and let stand in a cool place overnight.

Infuse, strain and bottle

  1. Add dried bay leaves to sauce and let infuse for 1 week.

  2. Strain sauce through a jelly bag.

  3. Transfer liquid into small bottles, cork tightly, and store.

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. Shallot + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together859 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Shallot + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together440 recipes

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

  3. Shallot + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Walnut + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pepper + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 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

Walnut pickle
Provides the main deep, dark flavour base of the sauce.
Indian soy
Adds salty, savoury depth that rounds out the sauce.
Anchovy
Contributes a savoury, umami-rich background flavour.
Mustard seed
Adds pungency and sharp heat that mellows during long cooking.
Shallots
Contribute aromatic sweetness and body as they reduce with the pickle.

The step that matters

Boil the walnut pickle and shallots down to 2 pints. Reducing concentrates the flavour and sugars of the pickle and shallots. Stopping at the right volume sets the sauce's strength, so it should be watched rather than rushed.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, walnut, anchovy, pepper, mustard):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, walnut, anchovy, pepper, mustard. 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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