Skip to main content
Sauce

Sauce, Store, for Cold Meat and Game

A sauce made from anchovies, garlic, shallots, spices, and ketchup, simmered and strained for use with cold meats and game.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sauce, Store, for Cold Meat and Game

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pound the anchovies, garlic, and shallots together.

  2. Add cayenne pepper, white pepper, mace, nutmeg, lemon, bay leaves, and basil.

Simmer and store

  1. Put the mixture in a saucepan and pour in walnut ketchup, mushroom ketchup, vinegar, and soy sauce.

  2. Simmer gently for one hour to extract the flavors.

  3. Strain the sauce, bottle it securely, and store 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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Garlic + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Shallot + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Dissolve into the liquid to add deep savory, salty umami flavor.
Garlic
Adds pungent aromatic flavor that mellows during gentle simmering.
Shallots
Contribute mild sweetness and aromatic depth to the sauce base.
Walnut ketchup
Provides concentrated savory, slightly tangy flavor as the main liquid.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds earthy, savory umami richness as a principal liquid.
Vinegar
Supplies acidity that brightens the sauce and helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for one hour. Gentle heat slowly draws flavor from the aromatics into the liquid. Boiling hard can make the sauce bitter and reduce it too quickly, so keep the heat low.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, garlic, shallot, pepper, mace, nutmeg, lemon):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, garlic, shallot, pepper, mace, nutmeg, lemon. 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

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes