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Another Very Good Sauce for Boiled Fowls, Veal, Rabbits and Fricassees

A sauce made from boiled meat broth, herbs, butter, flour, and cream, finished with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Another Very Good Sauce for Boiled Fowls, Veal, Rabbits and Fricassees

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine the cooking liquid, onion, parsley, lemon thyme, basil, mace, nutmeg, and peppercorns in a saucepan.

  2. Strain the mixture and bring it to a boil.

  3. Mix butter and flour to form a paste, then add it to the boiling mixture.

  4. Stir in the thick cream.

Finish

  1. If using for boiled fowls, add the lemon peel and juice just before serving.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + basiltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).

  3. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + basiltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,823 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts with the flour to form a paste that thickens the liquid and adds richness.
Flour
Forms a paste with the butter that thickens the sauce as it boils.
Thick cream
Adds richness and a smoother, more velvety texture to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the rich dairy.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour paste. Flour must be fully blended into the butter before it goes into boiling liquid. Added in lumps, it clumps and stays raw-tasting, while a smooth paste thickens the sauce evenly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, onion, parsley, lemon, thyme, basil, nutmeg):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Rosemaryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, onion, parsley, lemon, thyme, basil, nutmeg. 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.

More sauce for boiled meat recipes

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