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Sauce

Grill Sauce

A savory sauce made from gravy, butter, flour, and seasonings, thickened and served over grilled dishes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 405 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Grill Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the gravy and butter over low heat.

  2. Mix the flour with a little water to form a paste, then add it to the saucepan.

  3. Stir in the mushroom or walnut ketchup, lemon juice, mustard, capers, black pepper, grated lemon rind, essence of anchovies, minced shallot, and chili vinegar.

  4. Simmer the mixture for a few minutes until thickened.

Serve

  1. Pour some sauce over the grilled dish and serve the rest in a sauce boat.

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. Capers + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together405 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Mustard + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together859 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Mushroom + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the other flavours.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, glossy mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it simmers, giving it body.
Mushroom or walnut ketchup
Adds concentrated savoury depth and umami to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and butter.

The step that matters

Simmering until thickened. Flour needs to simmer for a few minutes to cook out its raw starchy taste and reach full thickening power. Stopping early leaves the sauce pasty, while boiling hard or too long can make it gluey and reduce it too far.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, mushroom, mustard, capers, pepper, shallot):

  1. Avocadofits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, mushroom, mustard, capers, pepper, shallot. 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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