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Sauce

French Sauce

A buttery vegetable sauce with carrots, turnip, onion, thyme, wheatmeal, and vinegar, simmered for 40 minutes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

French Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the finely chopped vegetables and thyme, and fry until slightly browned.

  3. Mix the wheatmeal with ½ pint of water until smooth, then add to the saucepan.

  4. Stir the sauce until it boils, then add the vinegar and season with pepper and salt.

  5. Let the sauce simmer for 40 minutes.

Strain and serve

  1. Rub the sauce through a sieve, return it to the saucepan, and bring to a boil 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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Turnip + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,352 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying the flavour of the vegetables and thyme.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and body as it softens and breaks down into the sauce.
Turnip
Adds earthy sweetness and body as it cooks down into the sauce.
Onion or eschalots
Adds savoury depth and aroma as it softens and browns in the butter.
Allinson fine wheatmeal
Thickens the liquid as its starch gelatinises when the sauce boils and simmers.

The step that matters

Stir the sauce until it boils, then simmer. Flour-thickened sauces can form lumps if the flour is not fully dispersed in the liquid first, and the starch only thickens properly once it reaches a boil. Stirring keeps the mixture smooth as it thickens.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, carrot, turnip, vinegar, pepper, thyme):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, turnip, vinegar, pepper, 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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