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Meat Sauce

A savory sauce made with bacon, mushrooms, stock, Worcestershire sauce, and mushroom ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Meat Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Slice the bacon and place it in a frying pan to render the fat, then remove the bacon once the fat is rendered.

  2. Add the flour to the pan and stir until smooth and browned.

  3. Gradually add the stock, stirring continuously until it boils.

  4. Stir in the Worcestershire sauce, mushroom ketchup, salt, and pepper.

  5. Add the mushrooms; simmer fresh mushrooms for 15 minutes or canned mushrooms for 5 minutes.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Mushroom + ketchuptop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon
Renders fat into the pan, which carries the flavour of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce as it cooks with the bacon fat.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it comes to a boil.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and body, softening as they simmer in the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the fat. Flour must be stirred into the hot bacon fat until smooth and browned before the stock goes in. Cooking the flour in fat coats the starch granules so they disperse evenly instead of clumping when liquid is added.

“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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