Skip to main content
Sauce

Devilled Sauce

A sauce of shallots, white wine, and cayenne pepper, reduced and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Shallot and white wine work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 881 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Devilled Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a vegetable pan, combine the sliced shallots and white wine.

  2. Reduce the wine to about ⅔ of its original volume.

  3. Season the sauce strongly with cayenne pepper.

  4. Strain the sauce through a fine mesh strainer.

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. Shallot + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together881 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

  3. 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

Shallots
Add a mild, sweet onion flavour that deepens as the sauce reduces.
White wine
Provides acidity and liquid that reduces into a concentrated, flavourful base.

The step that matters

Reducing the wine. Reducing concentrates the wine's flavour and acidity while the shallots soften into it. Stopping at about two-thirds volume keeps the sauce balanced rather than sharp or thick.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, 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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesWine Sauce for Sweet PuddingsWine Sauce for Sweet Puddings6 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes