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Sauce

Nut Sauce

A sauce made from finely chopped nuts, butter, stock, roux, egg yolk, and milk or cream, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mixed nuts and almond share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Nut Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the nuts

  1. Scald, blanch, dry, and chop the nuts fairly fine.

  2. Fry the nuts in butter until pale golden brown and season with salt and pepper.

Make the sauce

  1. Pound the nuts smooth, then gradually add the stock to the roux, alternating until fully combined.

  2. Finally, add the beaten egg yolk mixed with milk or cream to the boiling mixture.

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. Mixed nuts + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together42 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Almond + chestnuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together130 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Almond + walnuttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

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

  4. Mixed nuts + chestnuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Mixed nuts + walnuttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Mixed nuts
Provide the main body and nutty flavor of the sauce once pounded smooth.
Butter
Fries the nuts to a golden brown, adding richness and toasty flavor.
Roux
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce as it is combined.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce when added to the boiling mixture.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk to the boiling mixture. Egg yolk thickens through gentle heat; added to a boiling sauce it can scramble and curdle. Mixing it with milk or cream first helps it blend smoothly.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mixed nuts, almond, chestnut, butter, pepper, flour, egg):

  1. Cashew nutfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mixed nuts, almond, chestnut, butter, pepper, flour, egg. 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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