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Sauce

Rouennaise Sauce

A sauce made by adding pureed duck livers to Bordelaise sauce and gently heating.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Liver and red wine work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 105 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Rouennaise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare Bordelaise sauce as previously described.

  2. Pass the duck livers through a sieve to create a puree.

  3. Add the puree to the Bordelaise sauce.

  4. Heat the sauce gently for a few minutes to poach the liver, being careful not to overheat.

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. Liver + red winetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together105 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Sauce + livertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together499 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (soapy, waxy).

  3. Sauce + red winetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together322 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Duck livers
Puree thickens the sauce and adds a rich, savoury flavour and body.
Bordelaise sauce
Forms the red wine and shallot base that carries the flavour of the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Heating the sauce gently after adding the liver. Raw liver proteins set and turn grainy at high heat, so the sauce should be warmed gently just until the liver is cooked and the sauce stays smooth.

“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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