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Sauce

Russian Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, ham, shallots, herbs, vinegar, wine, white sauce, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Russian Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan.

  2. Add the ham, shallots, bay leaf, thyme, parsley, horseradish, sugar, pepper, nutmeg, vinegar, and wine.

  3. Cover the saucepan and steam the mixture gently for 15 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the white sauce and egg yolks.

  2. Heat the sauce until it begins to thicken, but do not let it boil after adding the eggs.

  3. Strain the sauce through a sieve before serving.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Shallot + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  4. Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and enrich it with richness and a smooth, velvety texture as they set gently.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and balances the sweetness and richness.
Horseradish
Provides a sharp, pungent bite that gives the sauce its characteristic heat.
White sauce
Forms the creamy base that carries the other flavours and gives body to the sauce.
Shallots
Add a mild onion-like sweetness and aroma as they soften during steaming.

The step that matters

Heating after adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat, but if the sauce boils they can scramble and curdle, leaving the sauce grainy and thin rather than smooth.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, ham, shallot, thyme, parsley, sugar, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, ham, shallot, thyme, parsley, sugar, pepper. 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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