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Sauce

Black Butter Sauce

A sauce made by browning butter, adding parsley, and finishing with vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and parsley 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 ↓

Black Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Warm the butter in a frying pan until it becomes brown.

  2. Add the chopped parsley and heat for another minute.

  3. Add the vinegar, pour into a sauce bowl, and serve.

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. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + vinegartop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,477 recipes

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

  3. Butter + vinegartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Browns to create a nutty, toasted flavour and forms the body of the sauce.
Parsley
Adds fresh, green aroma that brightens the rich butter.
Vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity that cuts through the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Browning the butter. Butter contains milk solids that toast as it heats. Stop the heat once it turns golden-brown and smells nutty, because it moves quickly from browned to burnt.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Garlicfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Capersfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, vinegar. 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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