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Sauce

Devilled Sauce

A thin sauce of shallots, white wine, and cayenne pepper, strained through muslin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and white wine work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 881 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Devilled Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine sliced shallots and white wine in a vegetable pan.

  2. Reduce the wine to about ⅓ cup.

  3. Season the mixture strongly with cayenne pepper.

  4. Strain the sauce through a muslin cloth.

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. Shallot + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together881 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

  3. White wine + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,433 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

Shallots
Adds a mild, sweet onion-like aroma that flavours the sauce as it cooks.
White wine
Adds acidity and flavour, and reducing it concentrates both into the sauce.

The step that matters

Reduce the wine to about ⅓ cup. Reducing concentrates the wine's acidity and flavour. Stopping at the right volume keeps the sauce balanced, while over-reducing makes it too sharp and intense.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, 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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