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Preserve

Spanish Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, flour, stock, ham, cloves, onion, celery, carrot, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Spanish Sauce

Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Spanish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and cook slowly over low heat until brown.

  3. Mix in the stock or consommé, ham, cloves, onion, celery, carrot, salt, and pepper, then stir until it begins to boil.

  4. Set the saucepan to the back of the stove and let it simmer gently for about an hour.

  5. Carefully skim off the grease and strain the mixture 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts to form the fat base that the flour is cooked into.
Flour
Cooked in the butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce.
Stock or consommé
Provides the liquid that the roux thickens into a sauce.
Lean raw ham
Adds savory meaty flavor to the liquid as it simmers.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and savory depth as it simmers in the liquid.
Carrot
Adds gentle sweetness and body to the simmering liquid.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. Cooking the flour slowly over low heat until brown cooks out its raw starch taste and builds color and nutty flavor. Heating too fast can scorch the roux before the flavor develops, and undercooked flour leaves a pasty taste.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, ham, clove, celery, carrot, pepper):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, ham, clove, celery, carrot, pepper. 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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