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Dilled Pumpkin Sauce

A sauce made from grated pumpkin, dill, green pepper, vinegar, sour cream, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Dill and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,630 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Dilled Pumpkin Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pumpkin

  1. Peel and grate the pumpkin, sprinkle with salt, and let it sit covered for 1 hour.

  2. Squeeze out the excess salt water thoroughly.

Make the sauce

  1. Prepare a weak thickening without onions.

  2. Add the grated pumpkin to the thickening and dilute with a little vinegar water.

  3. Stir in a large handful of chopped dill, including the stems if desired.

  4. Add sour cream and serve. Optionally include a green pepper for added flavor.

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. Dill + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,630 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Dill + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together659 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  4. Pumpkin + dilltop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Pumpkin + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,650 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Pumpkin
Forms the bulk of the sauce and gives it body and a mild sweetness.
Sour cream
Adds richness and a creamy texture to the finished sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness of the pumpkin.

The step that matters

Squeeze out the excess salt water thoroughly. Salting draws water out of the grated pumpkin. If that liquid stays in, the sauce turns thin and watery, and the salt level becomes uneven. Removing it well keeps the texture thick and the seasoning controlled.

Swap the pumpkin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (dill, pepper, vinegar, cream):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Pumpkinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against dill, pepper, vinegar, cream. 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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