Name: Universal Sauce
Ingredients: 1 pint stock; ⅓ cup white wine; salt to taste; pepper to taste; grated peel of 1 lemon; 1 bay leaf; a dash of lemon juice

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Universal Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

Combine stock, white wine, salt, pepper, lemon peel, bay leaf, and lemon juice in a pot.
Let the mixture macerate by the side of the fire for 8 hours.

Serve

Serve the sauce poured over meat, game, fish, or vegetables.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
White wine + lemontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,832 recipes

Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).
White wine + peppertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,433 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

White wine: Adds acidity and a bright, aromatic flavour to the sauce.
Lemon peel: Contributes aromatic oils that perfume the liquid during the long steep.
Stock: Forms the savoury liquid base that carries the other flavours.

“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.