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Barbecue Sauce

A sauce made from butter, mustard, red pepper, salt, and vinegar, used to baste or pour over meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,067 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Barbecue Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Mix the mustard with a little vinegar or water to form a paste.

  3. Stir the mustard paste into the melted butter.

  4. Add coarse sea salt and red pepper.

  5. Pour in enough vinegar to achieve your desired sourness.

Serve

  1. Baste meat with the sauce or pour it over warmed meat slices.

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. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Butter + mustardtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,003 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts into a rich fat base that carries the other flavours and coats the meat.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour and helps emulsify the sauce into a paste-like base.
Red pepper
Adds heat and a warm, pungent bite to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the mustard paste into the melted butter. Mustard is mixed first into a paste so it disperses evenly; adding it dry or in lumps can leave pockets of harsh flavour and uneven texture in the sauce.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardthe original
  3. Cabbagefits less well
  4. Onionfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, vinegar. 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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