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Ragout Sauce

A sauce stewed from sweetbreads, livers, combs, eggs, mushrooms, truffles, and force-meat balls in gravy, thickened with butter and flour, seasoned with salt, pepper, lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Veal and liver match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 392 recipes. Both carry enoic acid, which smells butter, cheesy. The science ↓

Ragout Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the sweetbreads, livers, combs, inside eggs, mushrooms, truffles, and force-meat balls together in a quart of rich brown gravy until tender.

  2. Reduce the gravy by at least half a pint.

  3. Roll the butter in flour and add it to the stew.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, and the juice of a lemon.

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. Veal + livertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together392 recipes

    Shared aroma: enoic acid (butter, cheesy).

  2. Mushroom + truffletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,900 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  4. Veal + truffletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together815 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Truffle + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, rich meat that forms the body of the stew.
Butter and flour
Thicken the gravy into a smooth, glossy sauce with body and richness.
Rich brown gravy
Serves as the liquid base that cooks the other ingredients and becomes the sauce.
Truffles
Add a deep, earthy aroma that gives the sauce its distinctive flavor.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy flavors of the sauce.

The step that matters

Reduce the gravy by at least half a pint. Reducing concentrates the flavor and thickens the liquid by evaporating water. Under-reducing leaves the sauce thin and dull, while the flour-butter thickener needs a properly concentrated base to set smoothly.

“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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