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Sauce

Robert Sauce

A sauce made from brown gravy, tomato ketchup, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and minced mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Robert Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Make a good brown gravy from the pan drippings.

  2. Add the tomato ketchup, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and minced mushrooms.

  3. Stir well to combine and heat through.

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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Tomato + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Tomato + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,482 recipes

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

  4. Mustard + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,120 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Tomato + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,469 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown gravy
Provides the savoury, thickened base that the other ingredients are stirred into.
Tomato ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity that give the sauce its tangy-sweet balance.
Mustard
Adds a sharp tang that cuts through the sweetness of the ketchup.
Worcestershire sauce
Adds savoury, slightly tangy depth to the sauce.
Mushrooms
Adds earthy savoury flavour and a little texture.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, ketchup, sauce, mushroom):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Horseradishfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, ketchup, sauce, mushroom. 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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