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Sauce

Bombay Sauce for Ham or Roast Hare

A spicy sauce made with butter, garlic, shallot, onion, chutney, stock, curry powder, pickle, and Espagnole sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Bombay Sauce for Ham or Roast Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Add the minced shallot, garlic, and onion, and sauté until softened.

  3. Stir in the curry powder, chutney, and stock, and bring to a boil.

  4. Boil for 20 minutes, then add the Espagnole sauce.

  5. Boil again and skim off any foam.

Finish

  1. Strain through a fine sieve and stir in the chopped pickle.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Garlic + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Clove + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Shallot + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,431 recipes

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

  5. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and carries the aromatics, giving the sauce a rounded mouthfeel.
Espagnole sauce
Provides the thick, savoury brown base that gives the sauce body.
Stock
Supplies the liquid that the sauce reduces, concentrating its flavour.
Onion
Softens into sweetness and builds the savoury base of the sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice aroma that defines the sauce's character.

The step that matters

Boil for 20 minutes, then add the Espagnole sauce. The long boil reduces and concentrates the stock and aromatics, so the sauce thickens and deepens in flavour. Adding the Espagnole afterwards keeps its body from being over-reduced.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, garlic, shallot, onion, sauce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, garlic, shallot, onion, sauce. 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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