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Sauce

A Simple Brown Sauce

A simple brown sauce made with butter, onion, flour, stock, and optional wine or pickles, finished with herbs and spices.

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 9,057 recipes mention both. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

A Simple Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Sauté the minced onion until it takes on color.

  3. Sprinkle in the flour and stir well until browned.

Add stock and strain

  1. Add the stock.

  2. Cook for a few minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture.

Season and simmer

  1. Add claret, cloves, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, salt, and pepper.

  2. Boil for 2-3 minutes.

  3. Strain again.

Piquante variation

  1. Substitute claret with minced cucumber pickles, vinegar, and capers.

  2. Add lemon juice and a little vinegar instead of claret.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together11,585 recipes

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

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the flour and onion, adds richness and a toasty flavor.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter into a roux.
Onion
Sautéing builds sweet, savory flavor and color in the base.
Stock
Forms the main liquid that becomes the body of the sauce.
Claret
Adds wine flavor and acidity, giving the sauce depth.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in butter. Cooking the roux until browned removes the raw, pasty taste of flour and builds nutty color and flavor. Stop before it darkens too far, because scorched flour turns bitter and spoils the whole sauce.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

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

  1. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  2. Chivebetter flavor fit
  3. Carrotbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, cucumber, clove, parsley, thyme, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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