Skip to main content
Main

Brown Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, carrot, onion, peppercorns, clove, celery seeds, herbs, flour, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Brown Sauce

Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 10,173 recipes mention both. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the sliced carrot, onion, peppercorns, and clove; fry until light brown.

  3. Stir in the flour and let it brown slightly.

Simmer and finish

  1. Tie the herbs and celery seeds in muslin and add to the saucepan along with the stock.

  2. Stir until boiling, then reduce heat and simmer gently for about 30 minutes.

  3. Strain through a fine strainer or tammy cloth.

  4. Season with salt before using.

  5. If too thick, add more stock or water.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Clove + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the vegetables' flavour and starts the roux with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a sauce once cooked and browned in the fat.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and dissolves the thickened roux.
Onion
Browns in the fat to add savoury, sweet depth to the sauce.
Carrot
Browns and adds gentle sweetness and body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour cooked in fat until lightly browned gives a nutty colour and flavour and removes raw starch taste. Stopping too early leaves a pale, floury sauce; going too far makes it bitter.

Flavor stand-ins for the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, carrot, onion, celery, flour):

  1. Parsleybetter flavor fit
  2. Thymebetter flavor fit
  3. Turmericbetter flavor fit
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, onion, celery, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.

More brown sauce recipes

Stewed Cod in 12Italian 6Mushroom 6Sharp 5Pheasant in 4Piquant 4 See all 188 →

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipesCelery CroquettesCelery Croquettes16 recipes