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Sauce

Chateaubriand Butter

A rich butter sauce made with wine, shallots, thyme, bay leaf, mushrooms, veal gravy, and tarragon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 602 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Chateaubriand Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Reduce ½ pint of white wine with chopped shallots, thyme, bay leaf, and mushroom trimmings by two-thirds in a saucepan.

  2. Add ½ pint of veal gravy and reduce the mixture to half.

  3. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve.

  4. Remove from heat.

Finish the butter

  1. Stir in 8 ounces of Maître d'Hôtel butter and 2 teaspoons of chopped tarragon.

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 + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Thyme + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together528 recipes

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

  3. Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

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

  5. Thyme + mushroomtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

White wine
Reduces down to build a concentrated, acidic base for the sauce.
Veal gravy
Adds body and savoury depth as the sauce reduces further.
Maître d'hôtel butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and richness, carrying the herb flavour.

The step that matters

Strain the sauce through a fine sieve. Straining removes shallot, thyme, bay and mushroom solids, leaving a smooth sauce with a clean texture before the butter is stirred in.

Swap the tarragon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, shallot, thyme, mushroom, veal, butter):

  1. Marjoramfits about as well
  2. Tarragonthe original
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, shallot, thyme, mushroom, veal, butter. 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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