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Sauce

Mint Sauce

A vinegar-based sauce with mint, salt, Tabasco, sugar, garlic, and onion juice, served hot with game.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Mint Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce

  1. Rub the crushed garlic onto a bowl.

  2. Add the mint leaves to the bowl.

  3. Boil the vinegar and pour it over the mint leaves.

  4. Stir in the salt, Tabasco sauce, sugar, and onion juice.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with game, mutton, or lamb.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Mint + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together576 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Vinegar + garlictop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Clove + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Mint leaves
Provide the main fresh, aromatic flavour of the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds the sharp acidity that gives the sauce its bite.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sauce, sugar, clove, garlic, onion):

  1. Gingerfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sauce, sugar, clove, garlic, onion. 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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