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Sauce

Sauce for Any Kind of Roast Meat

A sauce made with anchovy, red wine, gravy, shallot, and lemon juice for roast meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,523 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Sauce for Any Kind of Roast Meat

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine the cleaned anchovy, red wine, gravy, chopped shallot, and lemon juice in a saucepan.

  2. Stew the mixture together until well combined.

  3. Strain the sauce.

  4. Mix the strained sauce with the gravy that runs from the roast meat.

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. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Red wine + shallottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Anchovy + shallottop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together496 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Anchovy + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Red wine + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together779 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovy
Adds deep savoury flavour that rounds out the sauce without tasting obviously fishy.
Red wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth, and helps build the sauce's flavour as it stews.
Gravy
Provides body, moisture and savoury meat flavour to the sauce.
Shallot
Contributes a mild, sweet onion-like aroma that softens during stewing.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (anchovy, red wine, shallot):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Red currantfits less well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against anchovy, red wine, shallot. 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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