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Sauce

Quick Spanish Sauce

A quick sauce made with butter, flour, boiling water, salt, pepper, onion, turnip, carrot, parsley, and sweet herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Quick Spanish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

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

  2. Stir in the flour and cook until light brown.

  3. Gradually add the boiling water, stirring constantly.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

  5. Add the onion, turnip, carrot, parsley, and sweet herbs.

  6. Simmer slowly for 15 minutes.

  7. Strain the sauce before serving.

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

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

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 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

Flour
Thickens the liquid into a sauce as it cooks with the butter and water.
Butter
Carries flavor and adds richness to the sauce base.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and aroma as it softens in the simmering liquid.
Carrot
Adds subtle sweetness and body to the simmered sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour until light brown. Cooking flour in butter drives off raw starch taste and builds nutty flavor, while stopping early leaves the sauce tasting pasty. Stir constantly so it browns evenly without scorching.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, turnip, carrot, parsley):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, turnip, carrot, parsley. 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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