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Sauce

Bombay Sauce for Ham or Roast Hare

A sauce made with butter, garlic, shallot, onion, chutney, stock, curry powder, pickle, and espagnole sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Bombay Sauce for Ham or Roast Hare

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the shallot, garlic, and onion in the butter.

  2. Add the curry powder, chutney, and stock.

  3. Boil for 20 minutes.

  4. Add the espagnole sauce and boil again.

  5. Skim.

  6. Strain through a tammy.

  7. Add the chopped pickle.

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 + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Clove + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Butter
Fats the pan for frying the aromatics and carries their flavour into the sauce.
Espagnole sauce
Adds a rich, thick body and savoury depth to the sauce.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that the sauce reduces and carries flavour in.
Curry powder
Provides the warm spiced aroma that defines the sauce.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it cooks, building the sauce's savoury base.
Chopped pickle and chilli
Adds sharp acidity and heat that brightens the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Skim. Skimming removes fat and foam that rise during boiling; leaving them in gives the sauce a greasy, cloudy texture.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, garlic, onion, 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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