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Cream Sauce for Salt or Fresh Fish, or for Vegetables

A buttery cream sauce flavored with parsley, onion, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and optional horseradish, suitable for fish or vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cream Sauce for Salt or Fresh Fish, or for Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour, parsley, grated onion, pepper, salt, and nutmeg; mix well.

  3. Gradually add the cream or milk and bring to a boil, stirring continuously for 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with fresh fish, adding a pinch of horseradish if desired.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsley + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts to form the fat base that carries the sauce's flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and liquid.
Cream or rich milk
Forms the liquid body of the sauce and adds richness.
Grated white onion
Adds savoury aromatic flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring while the sauce comes to a boil. Flour thickens the liquid only if it is stirred as it heats; otherwise it can clump or scorch on the bottom of the pan, leaving lumps and a burnt taste.

Swap the horseradish

The recipe marks horseradish as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, parsley, onion, pepper, nutmeg, cream):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, parsley, onion, pepper, nutmeg, cream. 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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