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Sauce

Browned Sauce

A sauce made by browning flour and oil, then adding water, nuts, mushroom ketchup, spices, and bay leaf.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and pine match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,062 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Browned Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine flour and olive oil in a pan over low heat, stirring frequently to brown.

  2. Gradually pour in hot water while stirring well.

  3. Add the finely ground mixed nuts and stir until smooth.

  4. Incorporate mushroom ketchup, curry powder, celery salt, and the bruised bay leaf.

  5. Allow the mixture to boil slowly until ready for use in soups, fritters, spaghetti dishes, eggs, or salads.

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. Olive + pinetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Olive + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,571 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Mixed nuts + pinetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Flour + mixed nutstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together52 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pine + celerytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together75 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce and helps it brown when toasted in oil.
Olive oil
Carries the flour as it toasts, adding fat and helping it brown evenly.
Mixed nuts
Adds body and a toasted, nutty flavour as they are finely ground into the liquid.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in oil. Stirring the flour and oil over low heat lets it toast gradually. Too little stirring can scorch it, which gives a bitter taste, while under-browning leaves a raw, pasty flavour in the finished sauce.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, olive, mixed nuts, pine, mushroom, ketchup, celery):

  1. Cashew nutfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Walnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, olive, mixed nuts, pine, mushroom, ketchup, celery. 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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