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Wow Wow Sauce

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 624 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Wow Wow Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Chop the parsley finely and quarter and slice the pickled cucumbers.

  2. In a mortar, rub together the capers, chopped parsley, and egg yolks with mustard flour.

  3. Bone and pound the anchovies, then mix with oil, vinegar, shallot vinegar, and cayenne pepper.

  4. Combine the mixtures and stir into the rich gravy or melted butter.

  5. Pass the sauce through a sieve before serving.

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. Capers + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cucumber + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

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

  5. Cucumber + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Swap the walnut

The recipe marks walnut as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, cucumber, butter, capers, egg, mustard, flour):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, cucumber, butter, capers, egg, mustard, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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