Skip to main content
Sauce

Parsley Sauce

A sauce made by boiling parsley, chopping it, and mixing with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Parsley Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the parsley

  1. Wash the parsley in cold water.

  2. Boil the parsley in salted water for 6 to 7 minutes.

  3. Drain the parsley and remove the leaves from the stalks.

  4. Chop the leaves finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir the chopped parsley into the melted butter.

  2. Use 2 tablespoons of parsley for every ½ pint of butter.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled fowl or fish.

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 + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Parsley
Supplies the herb flavour, aroma and green colour that define the sauce.
Butter
Provides fat and richness, and carries the parsley flavour through the sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling the parsley for 6 to 7 minutes. Prolonged heat breaks down the chlorophyll that gives parsley its green colour, so the sauce can turn dull and olive. Draining well also keeps excess water out of the butter.

“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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes