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Sauce

Cashu-nut Sauce

A sauce made from scalded and minced cashu nuts, butter, salt, pepper, and a pinch of sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Cashu-nut Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the nuts

  1. Scald the cashu nuts to remove dirt and any shell.

  2. Dry the nuts with a cloth and mince them on a board.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over moderate heat.

  2. Add the minced nuts and fry until they turn pale brown.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a mortar and season with salt, pepper, and sugar.

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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Nuts + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,291 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  4. Nuts + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Nuts + peppertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together187 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Cashu nuts
Form the body of the sauce, providing its main substance and nutty flavour once fried.
Butter
Carries the frying, adding fat that coats the nuts and carries flavour.

The step that matters

Frying the minced nuts until pale brown. Frying in butter drives off moisture and browns the nut surfaces, so the nuts take on a toasty flavour. Taking them too far past pale brown can turn them bitter and dark, so watch them closely over moderate heat.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, sugar):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Walnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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