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Grill Sauce

A savory sauce made with gravy, butter, flour, ketchup, lemon juice, mustard, capers, pepper, lemon rind, anchovy essence, and eschalot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 624 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Grill Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, rub together the butter and flour until smooth.

  2. Add the gravy, mushroom or walnut ketchup, lemon juice, made mustard, minced capers, black pepper, grated lemon rind, essence of anchovies, and eschalot wine or minced eschalot, then mix well until all ingredients are combined.

  3. Heat the sauce gently before serving.

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. Mustard + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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 the flour, helps thicken it smoothly.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by binding with the butter and liquid.
Gravy
Forms the savoury liquid base of the sauce.
Mushroom or walnut ketchup
Adds deep, savoury umami flavour to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Rub the butter and flour until smooth. Working the flour into the butter until smooth creates a paste that blends evenly into the liquid. If flour is added in lumps, it can clump and leave a grainy or floury texture in the finished sauce.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, mushroom, mustard, capers, pepper, wine):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, mushroom, mustard, capers, pepper, wine. 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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