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Sauce

Nut Sauces

A sauce made from cashews, milk, and giblet essence, thickened with roux and finished with egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cashew nut and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 202 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Nut Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare a colorless giblet essence by omitting the coloring stage and straining it. Remove the fat and place the essence in a bowl.

  2. Scald the cashew nuts to remove dirt and shells.

  3. Boil the nuts in milk with salt, pepper, and sugar until soft.

  4. Drain and pound the nuts in a mortar, adding some of the boiling milk to moisten.

Make the sauce

  1. In a clean saucepan, mix flour and butter to make a white roux.

  2. Gradually add the giblet essence and nut paste until the sauce reaches a nice consistency.

  3. Off the heat, finish the sauce with the beaten egg yolk mixed with a tablespoon of essence.

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. Cashew nut + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together202 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cashew nuts
, once boiled and pounded, thicken the sauce and give it a rich, nutty body.
Flour
Forms the white roux with butter, which thickens the sauce as it is combined with liquid.
Butter
Enriches the roux and carries the flour, adding fat for smooth texture and flavour.
Egg yolk
Added off the heat to enrich and slightly thicken the sauce, adding richness and body.
Milk
Cooks the nuts until soft and moistens the pounded paste, adding creaminess to the sauce.
Giblet essence
Forms the savoury liquid base of the sauce, providing its main flavour.

The step that matters

Finish the sauce with the egg yolk off the heat. Egg yolk thickens by gentle heat and can scramble if the sauce is too hot. Removing the pan from the heat and tempering the yolk with a little hot essence keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the cashew nut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, pepper, sugar, flour, butter, egg):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Milletfits about as well
  4. Cashew nutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, pepper, sugar, flour, butter, egg. 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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