Name: Vegetable Marrow Sauce for Poultry
Ingredients: 2 medium marrows; coarse sea salt; cayenne pepper; ½ cup stock or ½ cup cream

Why it works: Pepper and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 21,449 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Vegetable Marrow Sauce for Poultry

Ingredients

2 medium marrows
coarse sea salt
cayenne pepper
½ cup stock or ½ cup cream

Directions

Prepare the marrows

Pare and skin the marrows.
Boil the marrows until tender.

Make the sauce

Rub the boiled marrows through a sieve.
Season the pulp with coarse sea salt and cayenne pepper.
Thicken the sauce with stock or cream.

Serve

Serve the sauce very 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.

Pepper + creamtop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together21,449 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Pepper and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 21,449 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Marrows: Make up the bulk of the sauce, providing its soft, mild vegetable body once puréed.
Stock or cream: Adds liquid and richness, loosening the purée into a smooth, pourable sauce.

“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.