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Spanish Sauce

A savory sauce made with stock, ham, vegetables, and herbs, thickened with gelatin and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Spanish Sauce

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 ↓

Spanish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the gelatin in a little stock for 1 hour.

Make the sauce

  1. Cook the butter and vegetables together for 10 minutes, avoiding burning.

  2. Add the flour and cook until brown.

  3. Gradually add the stock while stirring.

  4. Boil for 3 minutes.

  5. Add the herbs and spices.

  6. Simmer the sauce for 2 hours.

  7. Add the gelatin.

  8. Cook for an additional 15 minutes.

  9. Skim off the fat.

  10. Strain the sauce before serving over cutlets.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Butter
Cooks the vegetables and carries flavour, and the flour is cooked into it to form the base.
Gelatine
Adds body to the sauce so it clings to food when set or served.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that the sauce is built on and reduces during simmering.

The step that matters

Cook the flour until brown. Browning the flour in the butter develops nutty flavour and colour, but scorching turns it bitter. Stirring and watching closely keeps the roux evenly coloured.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, flour, butter, carrot, celery, parsley, clove. 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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