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Sauce

French Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, carrots, turnip, onion, thyme, wheatmeal, vinegar, pepper, salt, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

French Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the finely chopped carrot, turnip, onion or eschalots, and thyme. Fry until slightly browned.

  3. In a bowl, mix the wheatmeal with a little water to form a smooth paste.

Make the sauce

  1. Add 3/4 pint of water to the saucepan and stir in the wheatmeal mixture.

  2. Bring the sauce to a boil, then add the vinegar, pepper, and salt.

  3. Let the sauce simmer for 30 minutes.

  4. Strain the sauce through a sieve back into the saucepan.

  5. Bring it to a boil again and serve.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Turnip + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,352 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + oniontop 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

Butter
Fat that softens and browns the vegetables, adding richness to the sauce.
Wheatmeal
Flour that thickens the water into a smooth, pourable sauce.
Carrot, turnip, and onion or eschalots
Aromatic vegetables that build body and savoury flavour as they brown.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness of the vegetables.

The step that matters

Stirring the wheatmeal paste into the water. Flour lumps form if it is added to hot liquid without first being mixed into a smooth paste. Thorough stirring keeps the thickening even and the sauce smooth.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, turnip, vinegar, pepper, thyme. 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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