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Vegetable Sauce

A savory sauce of carrots, turnips, mushrooms, sausages, and chestnuts simmered in stock and flavored with sherry, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the carrot, turnips, mushrooms, sausages, and boiled shelled chestnuts into small pieces.

  2. Place the pieces in a stewpan or earthenware cooking pot.

Cook

  1. Add enough clear stock to cover the vegetables.

  2. Simmer until the vegetables are tender.

  3. Stir in 1 tablespoon of sherry, and add a little pepper and coarse sea salt.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + chestnuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together46 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Mushroom + sherrytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,176 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).

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

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

  5. Carrot + chestnuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together186 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Chestnuts
Give the sauce starchy body and a soft, mellow texture as they cook.
Mushrooms
Add savoury depth and moisture to the sauce as they soften in the stock.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and body to the sauce as it simmers.

The step that matters

Simmer until the vegetables are tender. Stopping too early leaves the pieces firm and the sauce thin, since starches and fibres only soften fully with sustained gentle heat. Keep the liquid at a gentle simmer so the pieces cook through without breaking down.

Swap the chestnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, mushroom, sherry, pepper):

  1. Beansfits about as well
  2. Chestnutthe original
  3. Lentilsfits about as well
  4. Chickpeafits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, mushroom, sherry, 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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