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Sauce

Regency Sauce

A sauce made by boiling eel slices in claret, then combining with espagnole sauce and finishing 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 base

  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 fine sieve.

Finish the sauce

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

  2. Boil and skim the sauce, then 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
Provides the main flavour and body of the sauce as it simmers in the wine.
Claret
Adds acidity and depth, extracting flavour from the eel and aromatics during simmering.
Espagnole sauce
Forms the rich, thickened base that gives the sauce its body and savoury character.
Anchovy butter
Adds savoury depth and fat, rounding out the sauce's richness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Boil and skim the sauce. Boiling concentrates the flavour and skimming removes impurities and fat that would make the sauce cloudy or greasy. Adding acidic and rich finishing ingredients after this keeps the sauce balanced.

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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