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Sauce

Parsley and Butter, or Maitre D’ Hotel Sauce

A sauce made by boiling parsley, mincing it, and stirring into melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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, or Maitre D’ Hotel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Tie the parsley in a bunch and boil it in salted water for 5 to 10 minutes, depending on its age.

  2. Drain the parsley, cut off the stalks, and mince it very finely.

  3. Stir the minced parsley into the 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 main herbal flavour and green colour of the sauce.
Butter
Forms the rich base that carries the parsley flavour and gives the sauce its body.

The step that matters

Boil the parsley for the right length of time. Boiling for 5 to 10 minutes, depending on age, softens the parsley enough to mince finely and mellows its bitterness. Overboiling dulls the green colour and flavour, while underboiling leaves it tough and harsh.

“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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