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Spanish Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, flour, stock, vegetables, herbs, spices, Worcestershire sauce, and Sherry wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Spanish Sauce

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 ↓

Spanish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, brown the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and stir until smooth and brown.

  3. Gradually add the soup stock while stirring.

  4. Add the carrot, bay leaf, onion, parsley, celery, thyme, and peppercorns.

  5. Season with Worcestershire sauce, pepper, salt, ginger, and nutmeg.

  6. Stir until the sauce thickens.

  7. Strain the sauce and stir in the Sherry wine.

Serve

  1. Serve with beefsteak, fillet, or warmed-over meat.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

Butter
Browns with the flour to add nutty flavour and fat for a smooth base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and stock.
Soup stock
Forms the liquid body of the sauce and carries its savoury flavour.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and aroma stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Add the soup stock gradually while stirring. Adding liquid slowly to the butter and flour mixture and stirring keeps the roux smooth, so lumps do not form and the sauce thickens evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, carrot, parsley, celery, thyme, sauce):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, carrot, parsley, celery, thyme, sauce. 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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