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Poivrade Sauce

A pepper sauce made with garlic, butter, onion, stock, vinegar, peppercorns, flour, lemon, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Poivrade Sauce

Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Poivrade Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Rub the bottom of a small saucepan with the garlic clove.

  2. Add the butter, onion slices, stock, vinegar, and peppercorns.

  3. Simmer until nearly reduced.

  4. Stir in the flour for a few minutes.

  5. Add more stock and coulis to achieve desired sauce consistency.

  6. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve.

  7. Squeeze in the lemon juice.

  8. Add a pinch of sugar.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Garlic + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,893 recipes

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

  3. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Garlic + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smoother mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as it cooks, giving the sauce body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and balances the richness.
Lemon
Adds fresh acidity to brighten the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour for a few minutes. Flour must be cooked long enough to lose its raw starchy taste before liquid is added. Stirring keeps it from scorching on the pan base and helps it blend smoothly into the butter and reduced liquid, avoiding lumps.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, garlic, butter, onion, vinegar, flour, sugar):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, garlic, butter, onion, vinegar, flour, sugar. 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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