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Sauce

White Sauce, for Fowls or Turkey

A creamy sauce made from boiled fowl necks, mutton neck, spices, and cream, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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. Combine the necks of fowls, a piece of scrag-end of neck of mutton, mace, peppercorns, anchovy, celery, lemon slice, and sweet herbs in a quart of water.

  2. Cover and boil until reduced to nearly ½ pint, then strain the mixture.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add ¼ pound of butter dredged with flour and boil for 5 minutes, then add 2 tablespoons of pickled mushrooms.

  2. Mix in 1 teacup of cream, the beaten egg yolks, and grated nutmeg.

  3. Stir gradually and heat over the fire until hot, but do not boil.

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and add richness as they set gently with heat.
Butter
Adds fat and body, and with flour helps thicken the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Heating after the egg yolks go in. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat, and boiling can curdle them into a grainy sauce. Stir gradually and keep the sauce just hot.

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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