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Sauce

Maigre Maitre D'hotel Sauce

A hot butter sauce flavored with parsley, lemon, salt, pepper, and optional shallots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 14,036 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

  1. Melt 1 pint of butter according to your preferred method.

  2. Stir in the chopped parsley, salt, pepper, lemon juice, and minced shallots if using.

  3. Heat the mixture until it just begins to boil.

  4. Serve immediately.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together14,036 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,118 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,039 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + shallottop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,718 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Lemon + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together2,484 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Forms the rich base of the sauce and carries fat-soluble aroma and flavour.
Parsley
Adds fresh herbal aroma and colour to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and balances its flavour.

The step that matters

Heating until it just begins to boil. Butter emulsion can separate if overheated, so the sauce should be heated only until it just begins to boil and then served right away.

Flavor stand-ins for the shallot

The recipe marks shallot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, pepper, lemon):

  1. Carrotbetter flavor fit
  2. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  3. Potatobetter flavor fit
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, pepper, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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