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Sauce

White Sauce with Sherry

A white sauce flavored with curry powder and sherry, seasoned with celery salt and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

White Sauce with Sherry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Blend the curry powder with a little of the white sauce.

  2. Stir this mixture into the rest of the white sauce.

Season and adjust

  1. Add the sherry, celery salt, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Taste and adjust the seasonings, ensuring no flavor overpowers the others, except for the cayenne.

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. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Sherry + celerytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  3. Sherry + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Sauce + sherrytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sauce + celerytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,360 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

Curry powder
Gives the sauce its warm, earthy aroma and golden color.
White sauce
Provides the creamy body that carries the other flavors.
Sherry
Adds sweet, nutty acidity and aroma that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Balancing the seasonings. Curry powder, sherry and cayenne can each dominate a small amount of sauce, so tasting before serving lets you correct the balance. Cayenne's heat builds gradually and is hard to remove once added, so add it cautiously.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, sherry, 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.

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