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Sauce

Grill Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, flour, mustard, lemon juice, capers, salt, pepper, Cayenne, lemon peel, shallot, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 405 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Grill Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and mix in the flour.

  2. Add the mustard, lemon juice, capers, salt, black pepper, Cayenne, lemon peel, and shallot.

  3. Pour in the gravy.

  4. Simmer gently for 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve part of the sauce over the grilled dish.

  2. Serve the rest in a 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. Capers + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together405 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Mustard + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together859 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and helping the sauce feel smooth.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the food instead of running off.
Clear strong gravy
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and supplies savoury depth.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and gravy.
Made mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that balances the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 15 minutes. Flour needs sustained heat to cook out its raw starch taste and thicken fully. Boiling hard can break the emulsion of butter and reduce the sauce unevenly, so a gentle simmer keeps it smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, mustard, capers, pepper, shallot. 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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