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Spanish Sauce, Quickly Made

A quick Spanish sauce made with onion, parsley, gelatin, celery seeds, tarragon, water, Bovril, salt, and a thickening agent.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,563 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Spanish Sauce, Quickly Made

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Peel and halve the onion, inserting a clove in each half.

  2. Place the onion halves, parsley, gelatin, celery seeds, and tarragon in a saucepan with water.

  3. Boil gently until the gelatin dissolves.

  4. Strain the liquid.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in Bovril and add salt to taste.

  2. Thicken the sauce with brown thickening or a flour-butter paste, cooking until smooth.

  3. Serve hot.

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. Parsley + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Celery + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together456 recipes

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

  4. Clove + tarragontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together548 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Clove + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatin
Dissolves into the liquid to give the sauce body and a light setting quality.
Flour and butter
Form a paste that thickens the sauce as it cooks until smooth.
Bovril
Adds concentrated savoury, meaty flavour to the liquid.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce. Flour-butter paste must cook long enough to lose its raw starchy taste and must be whisked in so it does not form lumps. Starch thickens as it heats, so the sauce needs to be kept at a gentle simmer while it thickens.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, parsley, gelatin, celery, tarragon, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, parsley, gelatin, celery, tarragon, flour. 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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