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Sauce

Mock Oyster Sauce

A sauce made from anchovies, water, mace, cloves, cream, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Mock Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Combine chopped anchovies, water, mace, and cloves in a saucepan.

  2. Simmer until the anchovies dissolve.

  3. Strain the mixture and let it cool.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add cream to the cooled mixture.

  2. Thicken the mixture with butter rolled in flour.

  3. Heat the mixture until thickened.

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. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Clove + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,009 recipes

Butter and flour 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

Anchovies
Dissolve into the liquid to give the sauce its salty, savoury depth.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds fat and a smooth mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when heated with the butter.

The step that matters

Heating after adding the butter and flour. Flour thickens only when heated enough for its starch to swell. Heat gently and stir, because cream can scorch or separate if it boils hard or sits over high heat.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mace, cream, butter, flour. 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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