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Sauce

Piquante Sauce

A savory sauce made with onion, carrot, peppercorns, vinegar, and water, simmered for an hour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 10,173 recipes mention both. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Piquante Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the sliced onion and fry until brown.

  3. Stir in the vinegar and let it boil until reduced by half.

  4. Mix in the flour until well combined.

  5. Add the water and stir until it boils.

  6. Add the remaining ingredients and let simmer for one hour.

  7. Strain the sauce carefully and return it to a clean saucepan.

Serve

  1. Heat the sauce before serving.

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

  1. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Butter
Carries the onion flavour and forms the base for the flour roux.
Onion
Browning adds deep, savoury flavour to the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity, giving the sauce its sharp, piquant character.

The step that matters

Reducing the vinegar by half. Boiling off the vinegar concentrates its acidity and flavour. Reducing it fully before adding liquid keeps the sauce from tasting thin or harshly sour.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, carrot, turnip, celery, vinegar):

  1. Parsnipbetter flavor fit
  2. Leekbetter flavor fit
  3. Beetrootbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, carrot, turnip, celery, vinegar. 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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