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Brown Walnut Sauce

A savory sauce made with browned fat, flour, stock, walnuts, chutney, pickles, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Brown Walnut Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Pour off ¼ cup fat from the frying pan.

  2. Add 5 tablespoons flour and stir until well browned.

  3. Gradually pour in 1¼ cups brown stock while stirring constantly.

  4. Once boiling, add the nut mixture.

Prepare the nuts and seasoning

  1. Break 2 ounces of English walnut meats into quarters and sauté in butter, using just enough to prevent burning.

  2. Mix ¾ tablespoon chutney, 1½ tablespoons chopped pickles, ⅔ tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, ¼ teaspoon salt, and a few grains of cayenne.

  3. Pour the mixture over the nuts and heat thoroughly.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Walnut + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,035 recipes

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

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Walnut + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Flour and butter 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
Browned with the fat to form a thickened base for the sauce.
Brown stock
Liquid that, with the flour, forms the body of the sauce.
English walnut meats
Provide the main texture and nutty flavour of the sauce.
Fat from frying pan
Carries flavour and helps the flour brown and form a roux.

The step that matters

Stirring the stock into the browned flour. Adding liquid gradually while stirring constantly keeps the flour dispersed, so the sauce thickens smoothly without lumps.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, meat, butter, sauce. 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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