Skip to main content
Sauce

Wine Madeira Sauce

A sauce made with Madeira wine, lemon, butter, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Wine Madeira Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, mix the flour, diced lemon, Madeira wine, consomme, 1 tablespoon of butter, salt, and nutmeg.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook for 15 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in the remaining butter until melted.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks, giving it body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy finish when stirred in at the end.
Madeira wine
Gives the sauce its characteristic sweet, nutty flavour and depth.
Consomme
Provides the savoury meat-stock base that carries the other flavours.
Preserved green lemon
Adds bright acidity and a sharp, tangy note to balance the richness.

The step that matters

Remove from heat and stir in the remaining butter until melted. Adding butter off the heat keeps it from separating or breaking into an oily layer, so the sauce stays smooth and glossy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, madeira wine, butter, nutmeg):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, madeira wine, butter, nutmeg. 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.

More madeira sauce recipes

Iced 3 See all 27 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesHot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce for Sweet PuddingsWine Sauce for Sweet Puddings6 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipes