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Sauce

Mint Sauce

A sauce made from chopped spearmint, vinegar, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Vinegar and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,806 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Mint Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash the spearmint until free from grit.

  2. Chop the spearmint finely.

  3. Mix the chopped spearmint with vinegar and sugar.

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. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Spearmint + vinegartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together34 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Spearmint + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Spearmint
Provides the fresh, aromatic mint flavour that defines the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and offsets the sharpness of the vinegar.

The step that matters

Chop the spearmint finely. Fine chopping breaks open the leaf cells and releases more of the mint oils into the vinegar, so the flavour is stronger and the leaves are less likely to stay tough or chunky in the sauce.

Swap the spearmint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Peppermintfits better
  4. Spearmintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar. 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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