Name: Piquante Sauce
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons minced pickles; 2 tablespoons minced shallots; 2 tablespoons minced olives; 2 tablespoons capers; 1 tablespoon lemon juice; 1 tablespoon caper vinegar; 1 cup Madeira wine

Why it works: Shallot and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 405 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Piquante Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

In a saucepan, combine minced pickles, shallots, olives, capers, lemon juice, and caper vinegar.
Add Madeira wine and mix well.
Simmer the mixture for a few minutes until heated through.

Serve

Serve the sauce with boiled beef, pigs' feet, calf's head, boiled tongue, calf's liver, or pork dishes.

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.

Shallot + caperstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together405 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,688 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Capers + lemontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,222 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,523 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,922 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Capers: Add a sharp, briny bite that cuts through rich meats.
Olives: Contribute salty, savory flavor and a firm texture to the sauce.
Madeira wine: Adds sweetness and depth, with aromatic notes that build as it simmers.
Lemon juice: Provides acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness.

“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.