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Mint Sauce

A condiment made from fresh mint, vinegar, sugar, and optional lamb liquor.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Mint and lamb work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 772 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Mint Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Strip the leaves from the mint stems, wash, and drain them on a sieve or dry on a cloth.

  2. Chop the mint leaves very fine and place them in a sauce tureen.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the pounded sugar to the chopped mint and mix well.

  2. Gradually pour in the vinegar and let the mixture sit for 1 to 2 hours to infuse the flavor.

  3. If desired, strain the sauce after it has stood, pressing to extract all the flavor.

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. Mint + lambtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together772 recipes

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

  2. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Mint + vinegartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Vinegar + lambtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together509 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Sugar + lambtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together429 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh young mint leaves
Provide the main green, aromatic flavor of the sauce.
Good vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the sauce and draws flavor out of the mint.
Pounded sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the sharpness of the vinegar.

The step that matters

Letting the mint infuse in the vinegar. Mint flavor is extracted slowly into the acidic liquid. Resting the mixture for the full 1 to 2 hours lets the flavor develop; pressing the leaves during straining releases the most aromatic liquid.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sugar, lamb):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Peppermintfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, lamb. 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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