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White Sauce, for Fowls or Turkey

A white sauce made by boiling fowl necks, mutton neck, spices, and herbs, then enriching with butter, flour, pickled mushrooms, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,467 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

White Sauce, for Fowls or Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. In a pot, combine water, fowl necks, mutton neck, mace, peppercorns, anchovy, celery, lemon slice, and sweet herbs.

  2. Cover and boil until reduced to nearly ½ pint.

  3. Strain the mixture and return it to the pot.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add butter dredged with flour and boil for 5 minutes.

  2. Stir in pickled mushrooms and mix with cream.

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. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Celery + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,006 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Mutton + anchovytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together170 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce and, with flour, thickens it into a smooth, rich body.
Flour
Coats the butter so it thickens the liquid without forming lumps.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the finished sauce.
Pickled mushrooms
Add a tangy, savoury flavour that cuts through the richness.

The step that matters

Adding the flour-dredged butter. Flour must be evenly coated on the butter and kept moving as it boils; otherwise it clumps instead of thickening the stock smoothly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, anchovy, celery, lemon, butter, flour, mushroom):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, anchovy, celery, lemon, butter, flour, mushroom. 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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