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Sauce

Leamington Sauce

A sauce made from walnut pulp, vinegar, walnut juice, soy, port wine, shallots, garlic, cayenne, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Leamington Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Procure young green walnuts and pound them to a pulp.

  2. Sprinkle liberally with coarse sea salt and let them sit for 3 days, stirring occasionally.

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. Shallot + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Walnut + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Port wine + shallottop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Vinegar + port winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together598 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  5. Vinegar + garlictop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar
Provides sharp acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the sauce.
Walnut juice
Gives the sauce its dark colour and a bitter, tannic depth of flavour.
Indian soy
Adds salty, savoury depth that rounds out the sauce.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and body that balance the sharpness of the vinegar.
Shallots
Add savoury aroma and background flavour.
Cayenne
Adds heat and a sharp, peppery bite.

The step that matters

Salting and resting the walnuts. Coarse salt draws liquid out of the pounded walnuts and begins softening and flavouring the pulp over the 3-day rest. Salting generously and stirring occasionally helps the salt reach all of the pulp evenly.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, port wine, shallot, garlic):

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Beansfits about as well
  3. Lentilsfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, port wine, shallot, garlic. 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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