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Brown Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, flour, water, onions, carrots, clove, Bovril, salt, pepper, and optional baked sour apple.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Brown Sauce

Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and 17,451 recipes mention both. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the vegetables

  1. Cook the vegetables and butter together slowly for 20 minutes.

  2. Move the pan to a hotter part of the stove and stir until the butter separates.

  3. Press the butter from the vegetables, then transfer the vegetables to a saucepan.

Make the sauce base

  1. Add the remaining butter and flour to the pan, stirring until smooth and brown.

  2. Gradually add the water while stirring continuously.

  3. Boil the mixture for 3 minutes.

  4. Add the mixture to the saucepan with the vegetables.

  5. Add all other ingredients.

  6. Simmer for 15 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the sauce.

  2. Serve the sauce.

  3. Use the sauce as a base for other sauces.

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Clove + appletop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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 its starch swells and sets when heated in the butter and liquid.
Butter
Carries flavour and fat, and browns with the flour to deepen the sauce's colour and taste.
Minced onion
Releases sweet, savoury aromatics during slow cooking that build the sauce's base flavour.
Minced carrot
Adds gentle sweetness and body as it softens slowly in the butter.
Bovril
Adds concentrated savoury, meaty depth to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the butter and flour, then adding the water gradually. Cooking the flour in butter until brown builds colour and flavour, and its starch thickens best when the water is added slowly while stirring. Adding it all at once or stopping stirring can leave lumps and a pale, raw-tasting sauce.

Flavor stand-ins for the apple

The recipe marks apple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, onion, carrot, clove, pepper):

  1. Limebetter flavor fit
  2. Avocadobetter flavor fit
  3. Lemonbetter flavor fit
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, onion, carrot, clove, 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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