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Piquante Sauce

A spicy sauce made with herbs, shallots, spices, vinegar, stock, butter, and optional pickled gherkins or capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 3,737 recipes mention both. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Piquante Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine sweet herbs, parsley, shallots, bay leaves, mace, cloves, salt, and vinegar.

  2. Cook until nearly dry, then add brown stock and stew for 15 minutes.

  3. In another pan, melt butter, add flour, and strained stock; bring to a boil.

Finish and serve

  1. Season with cayenne and serve.

  2. Optionally, stir in chopped gherkins, capers, or lemon juice before serving.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together3,737 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Shallot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,081 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

Vinegar
Provides acidity that sharpens the sauce and gives it its piquant character.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that gives the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the stock, giving the sauce body.
Brown stock
Forms the savoury liquid base that carries the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the herb and vinegar mixture until nearly dry. Reducing the vinegar concentrates its acidity and aromatics before the stock is added, so the sauce has a sharp, layered flavour rather than a diluted one.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, shallot, clove, vinegar, butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Tarragonbetter flavor fit
  2. Capersbetter flavor fit
  3. Thymebetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, shallot, clove, vinegar, butter, flour, pepper. 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.

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