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Sauce

A Sauce for Cold Partridges, Moor Game, Tyc.

A sauce made from anchovies, garlic, shallot or onion, salt, oil, lemon juice or vinegar, served with cold game.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Sauce for Cold Partridges, Moor Game, Tyc.

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Pound the anchovies, garlic, shallot or onion, and a little coarse sea salt in a marble mortar.

  2. Add oil and lemon juice or vinegar to taste.

Serve

  1. Mince the meat and mix it with the sauce as desired.

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. Garlic + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Garlic + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,893 recipes

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

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

Anchovies
Dissolve into the paste to add deep savoury, salty flavour.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma and sharpness to the sauce.
Shallot or onion
Contributes mild sweetness and body to the pounded base.
Oil
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and giving the sauce a smooth texture.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, garlic, shallot, meat):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, garlic, shallot, meat. 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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