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Sauce

Store Sauce for Roast Pork, Goose, &C

A fermented sauce made with sage, lemon peel, eschalots, salt, cayenne pepper, citric acid, and claret.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 887 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Store Sauce for Roast Pork, Goose, &C

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine sage, lemon peel, eschalots, salt, cayenne pepper, and citric acid in a jar.

  2. Pour in the claret (or port and sherry) and shake well.

  3. Let the mixture steep for two weeks, shaking it daily.

  4. After two weeks, let it sit for one day to settle.

  5. Pour off the clear liquid into a bottle and cork it tightly.

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. Sage + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + sherrytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

What each ingredient does

Green sage
Provides the main herbal aroma that flavours the liquid during steeping.
Claret
Acts as the liquid base that draws out flavour from the solids during steeping.
Eschalots
Add savoury, mildly sharp aromatic flavour as they steep in the liquid.
Citric acid
Adds sharpness that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Let the mixture steep for two weeks, shaking it daily. Flavour is slowly extracted from the solids into the liquid over time. Shaking daily keeps the solids in contact with the liquid and spreads extraction evenly. Stopping early leaves the sauce weak and unbalanced.

Swap the sage

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, pepper, sherry. 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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