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Sauce

Garlic Sauce

A sauce made by pounding garlic with butter and mixing into melted butter or beef gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Garlic Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pound the garlic cloves with the butter until well combined.

  2. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

  3. Stir the garlic mixture into the melted butter or beef gravy.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Garlic + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,630 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Garlic + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,572 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Garlic
Gives the sauce its sharp, pungent aroma and flavor.
Butter
Adds richness, fat, and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a fine sieve. Sieving breaks down and removes fibrous garlic bits and pulp, so the finished sauce is smooth rather than gritty or chunky.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, butter, nutmeg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, butter, nutmeg. 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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