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Tarragon Sauce

A sauce made with tarragon vinegar, butter, and optional glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,547 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Tarragon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pour tarragon vinegar into a saucepan and reduce it to half the quantity.

  2. Add good butter sauce and mix well.

  3. If the sauce is not strong enough, add a little glaze and a bit more tarragon vinegar.

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. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Tarragon + saucetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together566 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Tarragon + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,572 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Vinegar + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Tarragon vinegar
Provides the sharp, aromatic tarragon flavour that defines the sauce, concentrated by reduction.
Good butter sauce
Supplies the rich, buttery body and most of the volume of the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Reducing the tarragon vinegar. Reducing concentrates the vinegar's acidity and tarragon aroma. Reducing too far can make the sauce overly sharp, while too little leaves it weak in flavour, so the reduction should be watched closely.

Swap the tarragon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, butter, sauce):

  1. Tarragonthe original
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Garlicfits less well
  4. Parsleyfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, butter, sauce. 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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