Accompaniments Category

This is a steak sauce similar to Pickapeppa and Heinz 57.

This is a large, green Greek olive with very tender flesh.

Aioli is usually a mixture of mayonnaise and garlic. But it can be a mixture of olive oil and garlic.

This is a black, dry-cured Middle Eastern olive that's hard to find in the United States.

This large Chilean olive is cured in a wine or wine vinegar solution, which gives it a beautiful dark purple color and tart flavor. Its flesh is very tender and slightly bitter.

This is an excellent all-purpose wrapper, able to withstand both heat and cold. It's the best choice if you're wrapping foods for freezer storage, since it works better than plastic wrap at preventing moisture loss.

These are dark purple Greek olives that are hard to find in the U.S. They're great for snacking.

Supermarkets carry tubes of anchovy paste, usually near the canned tuna.

Apple butter isn't made from real butter. Instead, it's made by cooking apples until the sugar in them caramelizes, turning the sauce a rich brown color. It's used as a spread, and also as a fat-free substitute in many baking recipes.

You can use this like any other jelly, but it's often used as a glaze when roasting pork.

Applesauce is a purée made from cooked apples. It's often flavored with sugar, lemon juice, and spices like cinnamon and allspice. It's often served as an accompaniment to pork, sausages, and potato pancakes. It can also be used as a fat substitute in baking.

These are large green Spanish olives flavored with rosemary.

These are tiny green Spanish olives with a mild, smoky flavor. They're hard to find in the U.S.

This is made with oil, soy sauce, and other seasonings. Don't confuse it with the much sweeter American barbecue sauce.

This is a muddy-green Greek olive with soft flesh.

Southeast Asians use these to wrap and tie rice packets before steaming. They're hard to find fresh, but Asian markets often carry dried leaves in plastic bags. Soak them in warm water before using to prevent them from cracking.

Available in Asian food stores. This brownish sauce is often colored red to resemble tomato catsup.

People in the tropics use these huge leaves to line cooking pits and to wrap everything from pigs to rice. The leaves impart a subtle anise fragrance to food and protect it while it's cooking. Frozen leaves--once thawed--work just fine. Boil the leaves before using them to keep them from cracking. Look for banana leaves among the frozen foods in Asian, Hispanic, or specialty markets.

See the Kansas City BBQ Sauce recipe, Yet Another BBQ Sauce recipe, both posted by RecipeSource.com.

This salty brown sauce is made from fermented soybeans, and is available in cans or jars. If you buy it in a can, transfer it into a jar. It can then be stored indefinitely in the refrigerator. Chinese bean sauce isn't as salty as Thai bean sauce.

This is a spicy sauce made with berbera powder and other spices.

This is made from fermented black beans. A variation is hot black bean sauce, which has chile paste added, and black bean sauce with garlic. See the Asian Black Bean Sauce posting on RecipeSource.com.

Black currant jelly is sweeter than more common red currant jelly.

These are olives that have been allowed to ripen on the tree. American recipes that call for black olives are probably referring to the Mission olive. Other varieties of black olives are the Aleppo, Alphonso, Amphissa, black Cerignola, Gaeta, black Greek, Kalamata, Ligurian, Lugano, Moroccan dry-cured, Niçoise, Nyons, Ponentine, and Royal.

Borage is best known for its attractive blue flowers, but Europeans sometimes use the leaves as an herb in salads and soups. Borage has a mild flavor that's been likened to that of cucumbers. The leaves are covered with prickly, throat-catching hairs, so it's best to either blanch them or chop them finely before serving them.

These are used to make decorative flower stems on cakes.

A French specialty, these are whole chestnuts that are candied in a sugar syrup. They're used to make various desserts.

Candied ginger is ginger that is stored in a sugary syrup, but the name is also sometimes used for crystallized ginger, which is ginger that's been cooked in syrup, then dried out and rolled in sugar. The two are often used interchangeably.