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Sauce

Venetian Sauce

A tangy sauce made with butter, flour, boiling water, pickles, lemon juice, capers, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,222 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Venetian Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt half of the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add flour and gradually pour in boiling water while stirring constantly.

  3. Bring to a boil, then add pickles, lemon juice, capers, and remaining butter bit by bit.

  4. Season with salt to taste.

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. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy texture to the sauce.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny flavour that cuts through the richness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sauce.
Pickles
Add tangy acidity and a little texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling water to the flour. Flour clumps when liquid is added too quickly. Pouring gradually while stirring constantly keeps the starch dispersed, so it thickens evenly without lumps as it heats.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, capers):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, capers. 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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