Skip to main content
Sauce

Green Sauce for Ducklings, or Green Geese

A sauce made from spinach or sorrel juice, sugar, egg yolk, vinegar, butter, and optional gooseberry pulp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Spinach and gooseberry share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Green Sauce for Ducklings, or Green Geese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Wash and bruise the spinach or sorrel in a mortar.

  2. Strain the juice through a fine cloth.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the juice, sugar, egg yolk, and vinegar.

  2. If using spinach juice, add the butter and whisk over low heat until it begins to boil.

  3. For spinach juice, you can add gooseberry pulp instead of vinegar.

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. Spinach + gooseberrytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Vinegar + gooseberrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolk
Thickens the sauce and gives it a smooth, rich body as it heats.
Butter
Adds fat for a glossy, smooth texture and a rounder mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the green flavour and balances the sugar.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the acidity of the vinegar.

The step that matters

Whisking the yolk over low heat. Egg yolk thickens through gentle heat, but if it gets too hot it scrambles and curdles. Low heat and constant whisking keep the sauce smooth as it nears a boil.

Swap the gooseberry

The recipe marks gooseberry as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, sugar, egg, vinegar, butter):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Gooseberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, sugar, egg, vinegar, 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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes