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Sauce

Green Dutch Sauce

A green sauce made from béchamel, parsley, lemon, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Green Dutch Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the béchamel sauce with salt and cayenne pepper, and bring to a boil.

  2. Pound some parsley in a mortar and squeeze out the juice to create a green coloring.

  3. Add the parsley juice to the sauce and let it simmer.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, stir in the lemon juice to avoid discoloration.

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

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Sauce + parsleytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,693 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sauce + peppertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sauce and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,303 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Béchamel sauce
Forms the creamy, thick base of the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and brightness, and helps keep the green color from dulling.
Parsley
Provides the green color and a fresh herbal aroma.

The step that matters

Adding the lemon juice just before serving. Acid helps keep the parsley's green color bright, but heating it for long can dull the color and change the flavor. Stirring it in at the end keeps the sauce green and fresh-tasting.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, pepper, parsley):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Mangofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, pepper, parsley. 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.

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