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Walnut Sauce

A sauce made with flour, stock, pickled walnuts, and walnut vinegar, served over stew.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and walnut are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,873 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Walnut Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the flour with the stock or gravy and bring to a boil until the flour is fully cooked.

  2. Break up the walnuts and add them along with the walnut vinegar.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over the stew about 10 minutes 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. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Walnut + vinegartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Flour + vinegartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,652 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce when it is boiled.
Pickled walnuts
Supply the main sharp, savoury flavour of the sauce.
Walnut vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the stock.

The step that matters

Boil the flour in the stock until fully cooked. Raw flour tastes pasty and floury. Boiling it fully in the liquid swells the starch granules so the sauce thickens smoothly and loses its raw taste.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, vinegar):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, vinegar. 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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