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Sauce

For Coloring Gravies

A sauce made from butter, browned flour, optional celery, vinegar, brown sugar, and cayenne pepper, served with fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

For Coloring Gravies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Melt the butter in a frying pan over medium heat until it browns without burning.

  2. Add the browned flour and stir until the mixture thickens.

  3. For a sauce, mix in celery, vinegar, brown sugar, and cayenne pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve as a sauce for fish.

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. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + celerytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,905 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Browns in the pan to give the gravy a nutty, toasted flavor and fat base.
Browned flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks into a smooth, rich sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, buttery sauce.
Brown sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that balances the vinegar and spice.

The step that matters

Browning the butter. Butter that browns without burning develops toasty, nutty flavor compounds. If it scorches, the bitter burnt taste carries into the whole sauce, and it cannot be fixed by adding more ingredients.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, vinegar, sugar, pepper):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, vinegar, sugar, pepper. 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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