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Sauce for Hashes of Mutton or Beef

A savory sauce made from boiled bones, spices, onion, and butter, thickened with flour, served with hash.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sauce for Hashes of Mutton or Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Chop the bones and fragments of the joint.

  2. Place the chopped bones in a stew-pan and cover with boiling water.

  3. Add black pepper, allspice, parsley, celery, and savory.

  4. Simmer gently for 30 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. In another stew-pan, fry the sliced onion in butter over medium heat for 2 minutes until slightly colored.

  2. Stir in enough flour to make a stiff paste.

  3. Gradually mix in the gravy from the bones.

  4. Boil gently for 15 minutes until the sauce thickens to a cream-like consistency.

  5. Strain the sauce into a basin.

  6. Return the sauce to the stew-pan.

  7. Season with pickled onions, walnuts, gherkins, mushroom ketchup, or capers.

Serve

  1. Cover the bottom of the serving dish with toasted bread sippets to soak up the gravy.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Allspice + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms a stiff paste with the butter and onion, then thickens the gravy as it cooks.
Butter
Carries the onion's flavor and gives the roux a rich, smooth base.
Bones and fragments of the joint
Release gelatin and meaty flavor into the water, forming the body of the gravy.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savory, umami depth to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour to a stiff paste. Flour must be cooked in the fat before the liquid goes in; if it is not, the sauce tastes raw and may form lumps. Gradual addition of the gravy and gentle boiling keep the sauce smooth as it thickens.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, allspice, parsley, celery, lemon, butter, flour):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, allspice, parsley, celery, lemon, butter, flour. 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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