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Espagnole Sauce

A cold sauce made from egg yolks, cream, gelatin, and chicken stock, served with cooked meat on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,580 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Espagnole Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce

  1. Make a white sauce.

  2. Beat the egg yolks slightly and dilute with cream.

  3. Dissolve gelatin in hot chicken stock.

  4. Mix the stock with the white sauce.

Coat the meat

  1. When cool, dip pieces of cooked meat in the sauce.

  2. When cold, dip again for a second coating.

Serve

  1. Serve very cold on lettuce leaves and garnish with stuffed olives.

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. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Cream + gelatintop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Chicken + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,888 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid hexyl ester (sweet, green).

  4. Chicken + lettucetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,421 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Gelatin + lettucetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together128 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Add richness and help thicken the sauce as it is combined.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Granulated gelatin
Sets the sauce so it clings to the meat and firms as it cools.
Chicken stock
Adds savoury flavour and liquid to the sauce.
Cooked chicken, veal, or lamb
Provides the base that the sauce coats.

The step that matters

Dip the meat when the sauce is cool, not hot. Gelatin sets as the sauce cools. If the sauce is too hot, it runs off the meat and the coating is thin. Once it is cold, the second dip builds a firmer, even layer that holds on the plate.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, cream, gelatin, chicken, olive):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, gelatin, chicken, olive. 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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