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Grill Sauce

A savory sauce for grilled meats made with gravy, butter, flour, mushroom and walnut catsup, lemon, mustard, capers, anchovies, shallot, and chili vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and capers 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 ↓

Grill Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix the butter and flour until well combined.

  2. Add the gravy, mushroom catsup, walnut catsup, lemon juice, mustard, capers, black pepper, and grated lemon rind.

  3. Stir in the essence of anchovies and minced shallot.

  4. Simmer the mixture for a few minutes.

Serve

  1. Pour some sauce over the grill and serve the rest in a sauce tureen.

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. Mustard + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts with the flour to form a roux that thickens the sauce and adds richness.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter, giving it body.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding savory meaty flavor.
Mushroom catsup
Adds deep savory umami flavor to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.
Essence of anchovies
Adds a salty, savory depth that rounds out the flavor.

The step that matters

Simmer the mixture for a few minutes. Simmering cooks the raw flour taste out of the butter and flour mixture and lets the sauce thicken evenly. Boiling hard can scorch the bottom of the pan or break the sauce, so keep it at a gentle simmer while stirring.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, mushroom, lemon, mustard, capers, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, mushroom, lemon, mustard, capers, 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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