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Sauce

Sauce for Meat

A creamy sauce made with turnips or Jerusalem artichokes, cream, butter, flour, salt, and cayenne pepper, served over boiled meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,874 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sauce for Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the cream (or cream and milk) with the turnips or artichokes.

  2. Add ½ teaspoon of coarse sea salt and mix well.

  3. In a separate pan, melt the butter and stir in the flour to create a roux.

  4. Gradually add the cream mixture to the roux, stirring constantly until thickened.

  5. If desired, boil the cayenne pepper in the milk before mixing it with the vegetables.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce over boiled meat such as veal, lamb, or poultry.

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. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips or jerusalem artichokes
Cooked soft in the cream, they give the sauce body and a mild, sweet flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded flavour, and forms the base of the roux.
Flour
Its starch swells with heat and stirring in the butter, thickening the sauce.
Cream
Its fat gives the sauce a smooth, rich texture and a thick body.

The step that matters

Adding the cream to the roux. Adding the cream gradually while stirring constantly lets the flour starch disperse and swell evenly. Adding it all at once or without stirring can leave lumps and an uneven, thin sauce.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, cream, 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.

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