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Sauce

Boiled Marinade

A savory sauce made by simmering butter, onions, carrots, herbs, spices, vinegar, and stock, then strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Boiled Marinade

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a stew pan over gentle heat.

  2. Add the sliced onions, carrots, parsley, bay leaves, thyme, basil, cloves, mignonette pepper, mace, garlic, and chives, then stir with a wooden spoon until they begin to color.

  3. Add the vinegar and beef stock or boiling water, along with a little salt.

  4. Simmer slowly for about 45 minutes.

  5. Strain through a fine sieve before using.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + basiltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).

  4. Parsley + basiltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries and softens the aromatics, adding richness to the liquid.
Onions
Release sweetness and savory depth as they cook and color.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the simmered liquid.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the marinade and helps draw out flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring until the vegetables begin to color. Browning the onions and carrots builds deeper flavor through caramelization, but scorching gives bitter notes that carry into the whole marinade. Keep the heat gentle and stir often.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, carrot, parsley, thyme, basil, clove, pepper):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, parsley, thyme, basil, clove, pepper. 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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