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A Simple Brown Sauce

A brown sauce made with butter, onion, flour, stock, claret, spices, and optional variations.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 9,057 recipes mention both. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

A Simple Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and sauté the minced onion until it colors.

  2. Add the flour and stir well until browned.

  3. Pour in the stock and cook for a few minutes, then strain.

Finish the sauce

  1. For sauce poivrade, add claret, cloves, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, pepper, and salt; boil for 2-3 minutes and strain again.

  2. For sauce piquante, add minced cucumber pickles, vinegar, and capers instead of claret.

  3. For sauce Robert, add made mustard, lemon juice, and a little vinegar instead of claret.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together11,585 recipes

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

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fat that cooks the onion gently and carries flavour into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth, lightly body-filled sauce when browned.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce.
Claret
Adds wine acidity and depth for the poivrade version.

The step that matters

Stir the flour until browned. Flour needs steady stirring over heat to brown evenly without scorching. Scorched starch gives a bitter taste and uneven colour, and it cannot be fixed once it burns.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

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

  1. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  2. Carrotbetter flavor fit
  3. Parsnipbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, clove, parsley, thyme, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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