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Sauce

Buown Chestnut Sauce

A sauce made by mixing chestnuts with gravy and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Chestnut and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 313 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Buown Chestnut Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the chestnut sauce

  1. Substitute rich brown gravy for veal stock and omit lemon rind and cream.

  2. Mix chestnuts with a few tablespoons of gravy after passing them through a sieve.

Make the parsley-green

  1. For parsley-green, gather young parsley, strip leaves from stalks, and wash thoroughly.

  2. Dry parsley in a cloth, then pound it in a mortar.

  3. Press juice through a fine sieve into a clean jar.

  4. Set the jar in a pan of boiling water and simmer gently for about three minutes.

  5. Drain the juice on a clean sieve and it's ready for use.

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. Chestnut + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together313 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Veal + parsleytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,766 recipes

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

  3. Veal + chestnuttop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together175 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

Chestnuts
Provide the main body and thick texture of the sauce when passed through a sieve.
Rich brown gravy
Supplies savory liquid and moisture that loosens the chestnuts into a sauce.
Parsley
Supplies the fresh green colour and herbal aroma of the parsley-green.

The step that matters

Simmering the parsley juice in boiling water. Heating the juice only gently for about three minutes is what sets the color; prolonged or hard boiling can dull the green and turn it olive.

Swap the chestnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, parsley):

  1. Walnutfits about as well
  2. Lentilsfits about as well
  3. Chestnutthe original
  4. Chickpeafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, 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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