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Espagnole, or Spanish Sauce

A brown sauce made with stock, ham or bacon, butter, flour, vegetables, herbs, tomato pulp, sherry, and mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Espagnole, or Spanish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the ham, cut into small pieces, and fry for a few minutes.

  3. Add the sliced vegetables, herbs, and spices.

  4. Stir over low heat for about 5 minutes.

  5. Add the flour and brown it carefully.

Simmer and strain

  1. Pour in the stock, tomato pulp, and sherry.

  2. Stir the sauce until boiling.

  3. Reduce heat and let it simmer slowly for about 1 hour.

  4. Skim off the fat and strain the sauce through a fine cloth.

  5. Season to taste, warm up, and serve.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the flavour of the aromatics and forms the base of the roux with flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when browned with butter and stock, giving it body.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens and the simmering concentrates.
Ham
Adds savoury, meaty flavour as it fries in the butter.
Tomato pulp
Adds acidity and colour, balancing the richness of the stock and butter.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour must brown gently in the fat, stirred constantly. Scorched flour turns bitter and dark, while under-browned flour leaves a raw, pasty taste and weak colour in the finished sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, butter, flour, carrot, clove, parsley, thyme):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, butter, flour, carrot, clove, parsley, thyme. 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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