Name: White Sauce with Flavors
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons melted butter; 2 tablespoons ketchup; 2 tablespoons soy sauce; 2 tablespoons flavored vinegar (such as elder or tarragon); ¼ teaspoon pepper; ¼ teaspoon fine spice; 1 tablespoon sweet herbs; 1 tablespoon capers; 1 tablespoon chopped shallots

Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

White Sauce with Flavors

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

Melt the butter in a saucepan.
Add ketchup, soy sauce, and flavored vinegar to the melted butter.
Stir in pepper, fine spice, sweet herbs, capers, and shallots.
Cook over low heat until heated through.

Serve

Serve with roasted meats.

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.

Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,099 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Capers + shallottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together405 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Sauce + caperstop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together678 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Pepper + shallottop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,898 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Vinegar + shallottop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,374 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter: Melted butter forms the fat base that carries the other flavourings.
Ketchup: Adds sweetness and acidity to the sauce.
Soy sauce: Adds savoury, salty depth to the sauce.
Flavored vinegar: Adds sharp acidity and aroma that brightens the sauce.
Capers: Add briny, sharp bursts of flavour.

Flavor stand-ins for the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, ketchup, sauce, vinegar, pepper, shallot):

Capersthe original
Tarragonabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, ketchup, sauce, vinegar, pepper, shallot. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.