Name: Tarragon Sauce
Ingredients: ½ pint Clear Brown Sauce (No. 22); 3 small sprays of green tarragon; 12 leaves of fresh tarragon

Why it works: Sauce and tarragon work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 566 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Tarragon Sauce

Ingredients

½ pint Clear Brown Sauce (No. 22)
3 small sprays of green tarragon
12 leaves of fresh tarragon

Directions

Simmer the Clear Brown Sauce with 3 small sprays of green tarragon for 5 minutes.
Remove the sprays and shred 12 leaves of fresh tarragon.
Add the shredded tarragon to the sauce and serve.

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.

Sauce + tarragontop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together566 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Clear brown sauce: Forms the savoury base and body of the sauce.
Green tarragon: Infuses the sauce with its aroma as it simmers, then is removed.
Fresh tarragon: Adds a bright, fresh herbal aroma at the end of cooking.

“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.