Skip to main content
Sauce

Sauce K LA

A savory sauce made with garlic, mustard, parsley, shallots, onion, hard‑boiled egg yolks, oil, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 29,030 recipes mention both. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub a bowl with a fresh-cut clove of garlic.

  2. Add made mustard, salt, pepper, minced parsley, shallots, onion, and hard-boiled egg yolks to the bowl.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix in salad oil drop by drop.

  2. As the sauce thickens, add vinegar and mix well.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together29,030 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Mustard + shallottop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Parsley + shallottop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,718 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together9,294 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled egg yolks
Their emulsifying lecithin helps the oil and mustard bind into a thick, smooth sauce.
Salad oil
Dispersed in droplets, it gives the sauce its rich body and creamy texture.
Made mustard
Its emulsifiers help hold the oil and yolks together and add sharp flavour.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich yolk and oil and balances the flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the oil drop by drop. Oil added too fast cannot be absorbed by the yolks and mustard, so the emulsion breaks and the sauce turns thin and greasy.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (garlic, mustard, pepper, parsley, shallot, egg, vinegar):

  1. Chivebetter flavor fit
  2. Broccolibetter flavor fit
  3. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against garlic, mustard, pepper, parsley, shallot, egg, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.

You might also like

Illustration of Mixed MustardIllustrationMixed Mustard9 recipesIllustration of Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)IllustrationWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesIllustration of Caper SauceIllustrationCaper Sauce180 recipesIllustration of Brown SauceIllustrationBrown Sauce141 recipes