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Veloute Sauce

A sauce made with veal or chicken remnants, mushrooms, onions, carrots, and white stock, finished with butter, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Veloute Sauce

Why it works: Carrot and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Veloute Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt butter in a saucepan and add veal or chicken remnants and mushrooms, and let them brown slightly.

  2. Add bouquet garni, carrot slices, onions, flour, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and cloves.

  3. Pour in enough white stock to cover the ingredients and simmer for 1.5 hours.

  4. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Carrot + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and stock.
Butter
Carries flavour and enriches the sauce while the meat and mushrooms brown.
White stock
Forms the liquid base that the sauce simmers in and gives it body.
Veal or chicken remnants
Provides meaty flavour that the stock carries into the sauce.
Mushrooms
Add earthy savoury flavour as they brown in the butter.
Onions
Add sweetness and depth as they cook slowly in the stock.

The step that matters

Simmer after adding the stock. Flour must be cooked in the liquid long enough to lose its raw taste and fully thicken the sauce. Simmering gently, rather than boiling hard, keeps the sauce smooth and prevents scorching on the base of the pan.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, mushroom, butter, carrot, flour, pepper, nutmeg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, mushroom, butter, carrot, flour, pepper, nutmeg. 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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