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Sauce

Cold Sauce

A mayonnaise-based sauce with capers, cucumber pickles, parsley, and optional onion, served with fried fish, cold tongue, or ham.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Cold Sauce

Why it works: Capers and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cold Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine the mayonnaise sauce, capers, cucumber pickles, chopped parsley, and onion if desired, then mix all ingredients together until well combined.

  2. Serve as a sauce for fried fish, cold tongue, or ham.

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. Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Capers + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cucumber + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Capers + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 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

Mayonnaise sauce
Forms the creamy base that carries the other ingredients and gives the sauce its body.
Capers
Add a sharp, salty acidity that cuts through the richness of the mayonnaise.
Cucumber pickles
Contribute tangy acidity and a crisp texture finely chopped through the sauce.
Parsley
Adds fresh, green aroma and a mild herbal flavour.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, capers, cucumber, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, capers, cucumber, parsley. 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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