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Sauce

Parsley and Butter

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 and Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the parsley

  1. Wash and pick the parsley carefully.

  2. Boil the parsley with ½ teaspoon of coarse sea salt in a little water for 10 minutes.

  3. Drain the parsley and bruise it to a pulp.

Finish the butter

  1. Gradually mix the parsley pulp with ½ cup of melted butter.

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
Provides the green color and fresh, herbal flavor of the butter.
Butter
Carries the parsley flavor and gives the finished spread a rich, smooth texture.

The step that matters

Gradually mix the parsley pulp into the butter. Adding the pulp slowly lets it disperse evenly through the fat, so the herb flavor and color spread through the butter instead of clumping in streaks.

“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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