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Sauce

Demi-glace Sauce

A sauce made by reducing espagnole sauce with good gravy and seasoning with pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,303 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Demi-glace Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Reduce 1 pint of espagnole sauce with ½ cup of good gravy.

  2. Allow the mixture to simmer for about 15 minutes.

  3. Season with a pinch of pepper.

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. Sauce + peppertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sauce and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,303 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

Espagnole sauce
Forms the rich, thick base of the sauce.
Good gravy
Adds concentrated meaty flavour that deepens as the sauce reduces.

The step that matters

Reduce the sauce gently. Reducing concentrates the flavour and thickens the sauce by evaporating water. Rapid boiling can scorch the proteins and sugars on the pan and make the sauce bitter, so a steady simmer is safer.

“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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