Skip to main content
Main

Poivarde Sauce

A sauce made with minced ham, onion, carrot, cloves, peppercorns, parsley, bay leaf, thyme, butter, tarragon vinegar, and veal stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Poivarde Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter over medium heat in a pan.

  2. Fry the minced ham for a moment.

  3. Add the minced onion, carrot, cloves, peppercorns, parsley, bay leaf, and thyme.

  4. Simmer for 20 minutes.

  5. Stir in the tarragon vinegar.

Strain and finish

  1. Strain the mixture.

  2. Press the strained mixture to extract the juice.

  3. Add the extracted juice to the veal stock.

  4. Boil for 5 minutes.

  5. Skim off the fat.

  6. Thicken the sauce as desired.

  7. Serve with fish or game.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Thyme + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together528 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Parsley + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal stock
Forms the liquid body of the sauce, carrying the flavour of the aromatics.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the aromatics release their flavour when melted and cooked.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the stock and fat.
Onion
Contributes savoury sweetness and depth as it softens and cooks down into the base.

The step that matters

Skim off the fat. Fat rendered from the ham and butter floats on the surface of the stock. Leaving it in makes the sauce greasy and cloudy, so it should be removed before thickening and serving.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, carrot, clove, parsley, thyme, butter, tarragon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, carrot, clove, parsley, thyme, butter, tarragon. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesBeef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes