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Garlic Puree

A soft garlic puree mixed with gravy or brown sauce, served hot with roast or braised meats.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and garlic are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,368 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Garlic Puree

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skin the cloves of garlic.

  2. Cook them in a saucepan of boiling water, changing the water every 5 minutes, until soft.

  3. Add the salt in the last water.

Make the puree

  1. Pound the garlic and add gravy or brown sauce to make a thick puree.

  2. For roast mutton, use the plain gravy from the joint.

  3. For braised meats, use the gravy from the pan or strong stock.

  4. Stew the garlic and gravy together for a short time and serve very hot.

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Garlic + saucetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,007 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Clove + saucetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,089 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Garlic
Provides the main pungent flavour, which softens and mellows as the cloves are cooked in water.
Gravy or brown sauce
Supplies liquid and savoury body so the pounded garlic forms a thick puree.

The step that matters

Cooking the garlic until soft. Boiling in fresh water several times softens the cloves and reduces their sharp, raw pungency. Stopping too early leaves the garlic harsh and hard to pound into a smooth puree.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against garlic, 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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