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Sauce

Chives Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, bread crumbs, broth, and chives, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chives Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the bread crumbs and stir until golden brown.

  3. Pour in the broth and add the chives.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

  5. Stir the sauce over heat until boiling, ensuring it remains smooth.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Chive + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,885 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Bread + chivetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together265 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + chivetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Toasted in butter, they add a golden colour and nutty flavour and thicken the sauce.
Butter
Carries the flavour of the dish and helps toast the bread crumbs.
Broth
Provides the liquid base that the crumbs soften into a sauce.
Chives
Add a mild onion-like freshness and green aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the sauce over heat until boiling. Bread crumbs can clump or scorch if the heat is uneven or stirring stops. Constant stirring keeps the starch and crumbs evenly dispersed, so the sauce thickens smoothly as it comes to a boil.

Swap the chive

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Chivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, pepper. 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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