Skip to main content
Main

Espagnole or Spanish Sauce

A rich brown sauce made with stock, ham or bacon, butter, flour, vegetables, herbs, tomato pulp, and optional sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Espagnole or Spanish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the ham, cut into small pieces, and fry for a few minutes.

  3. Add the sliced vegetables, herbs, and spices.

  4. Stir over low heat for 5 minutes.

  5. Add the flour and brown it carefully.

  6. Stir in the stock, tomato pulp, and sherry (if using).

  7. Bring to a boil.

  8. Reduce heat and let it simmer for 1 hour.

  9. Skim the sauce.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain through a fine cloth.

  2. Season.

  3. Warm up.

  4. Serve.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the flavour of the ham and vegetables and forms the base for the roux.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the fat, giving it body.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, supplying most of its volume and savoury flavour.
Tomato pulp
Adds acidity and colour, and a fuller flavour to the sauce.
Ham
Contributes savoury, salty meat flavour that deepens the sauce.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth as it softens and browns in the fat.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour cooked in fat must be browned gently and carefully. Undercooked roux tastes raw and pasty, while over-browned flour loses thickening power and turns bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, butter, flour, carrot, clove, parsley, thyme):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, butter, flour, carrot, clove, parsley, 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.

More espagnole sauce recipes

with Wine 4 See all 64 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipes