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Sauce

Poivrade or Pepper Sauce

A pepper sauce made with carrot, onion, bacon, butter, thyme, peppercorns, and brown sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,563 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Poivrade or Pepper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a stew pan, combine the diced carrot, onion, bacon, butter, thyme, and crushed peppercorns.

  2. Fry for a few minutes until fragrant, then strain off the fat.

  3. Add the brown sauce and bring to a boil.

  4. Simmer for 15 minutes, then skim and strain before serving.

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. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour that carries through the sauce.
Brown sauce (espagnole)
Forms the body of the sauce, giving it thickness and a rich base.
Butter
Adds fat for frying the vegetables and rounds out the flavour.
Carrot
Adds subtle sweetness and aromatic depth as it softens.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth as it softens in the fat.

The step that matters

Straining off the fat after frying. Leaving too much rendered bacon and butter fat in the pan makes the sauce greasy and heavy on the palate. Removing it before adding the brown sauce keeps the finished sauce clean and glossy.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, thyme, sauce):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, thyme, sauce. 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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