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Piquant Sauce

A spicy sauce made with butter, onions, flour, stock, herbs, cayenne pepper, vinegar, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Piquant Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the chopped onions and stir for 2 minutes.

  3. Sprinkle the flour over the onions and stir with a wooden spoon to prevent lumps.

  4. Add the stock, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, and cayenne pepper.

  5. Simmer gently for 20 minutes, then remove the herbs.

  6. Stir in the vinegar and add salt and pepper to taste.

  7. Bring to a boil 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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the onions and flour and adds richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth, lightly body sauce as it cooks.
Stock or broth
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries its savoury flavour.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness.
Cayenne pepper
Provides the heat that gives the sauce its piquant character.

The step that matters

Sprinkle the flour over the onions and stir constantly. Flour added to hot fat must be stirred well so its starch coats each grain evenly; otherwise it clumps into lumps that do not dissolve smoothly into the liquid later.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, parsley, thyme, pepper, vinegar. 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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