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Sauce

Regency Sauce

A sauce made by boiling eel slices with wine spices, then reducing with espagnole and adding truffle essence, anchovy butter, nutmeg, lemon juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,108 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Regency Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the essence

  1. Boil the eel slices gently in claret with cloves, mace, thyme, bay leaf, carrot, mushrooms, onion, and salt for 30 minutes.

  2. Rub the mixture through a tamis to extract the essence.

Finish the sauce

  1. In a sautoir, combine the essence with a ladleful of espagnole sauce.

  2. Boil and skim the sauce.

  3. Finish by adding essence of truffles, anchovy butter, nutmeg, lemon juice, and sugar.

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. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Mushroom + truffletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,900 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Thyme + mushroomtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Eel
Gives the essence its main body and fish flavour as it simmers in the wine.
Claret
Its acidity and tannins extract flavour from the eel and aromatics into the liquid.
Espagnole sauce
Provides the thick brown base that gives the finished sauce body and savoury depth.
Essence of truffles
Adds a concentrated earthy aroma that rounds out the sauce.
Anchovy butter
Adds fat and salty, savoury depth that enriches the sauce's flavour.

The step that matters

Boil and skim the sauce. Boiling concentrates the flavours and reduces the sauce, while skimming removes scum and impurities that would otherwise cloud the sauce and taste bitter or dull.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, thyme, carrot, mushroom, onion, sauce, truffle):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, thyme, carrot, mushroom, onion, sauce, truffle. 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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