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Sauce Poivrade

A savory sauce made with ham or bacon, vegetables, spices, vinegar, mushroom ketchup, anchovy paste, brown sauce, stock, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Sauce Poivrade

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a small saucepan, fry the ham or bacon, carrot, celery, onion, bay leaf, thyme, peppercorns, and mace in butter over medium heat until browned.

  2. Add vinegar, mushroom ketchup, and anchovy paste, then reduce the mixture by half.

Finish the sauce

  1. Stir in brown sauce, stock, and sherry, and let the sauce boil gently.

  2. Remove any grease and strain the sauce through a sieve into a clean saucepan for use.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Celery + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,193 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown sauce
Forms the thick, rich body of the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens and balances the rich flavours.
Sherry
Adds depth and a sweet, aromatic note to the sauce.
Mushroom ketchup
Contributes savoury, umami depth to the sauce.
Butter
Carries the aromatics and helps the vegetables brown for flavour.

The step that matters

Reduce the mixture by half. Reducing concentrates flavour and thickens the liquid. Cooking too briefly leaves the sauce thin and weak, while over-reducing can make it salty or overly intense once the brown sauce and stock are added.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, carrot, celery, onion, thyme, butter, vinegar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, carrot, celery, onion, thyme, butter, vinegar. 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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