Skip to main content
Main

Bacon Sauce

A sauce made from diced ham or bacon, onion, flour, vinegar, water, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Bacon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Fry the bacon in a pan until slightly crispy.

  2. Add the chopped onion and sprinkle in the flour.

  3. Fry slowly until the onion is lightly browned.

  4. Season with salt and pepper, then add the vinegar and water.

  5. Stir until the mixture reaches a boil.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over previously cooked potatoes and serve with roast chicken or veal.

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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  2. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

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

  4. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Ham + oniontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,159 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Ham or bacon
Renders fat and adds savoury flavour to the base of the sauce.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aroma as it browns in the bacon fat.
Flour
Thickens the fat and onion mixture to give the sauce body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the onion and flour slowly. Browning the onion gently builds flavour, while cooking the flour in fat removes its raw taste and helps it thicken the liquid smoothly once water is added.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, flour, vinegar, 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes