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Sauce

Mock Parsley Sauce

A sauce made by infusing parsley seeds in water and using the infusion to melt 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 ↓

Mock Parsley Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse the water

  1. Tie the parsley seeds in a piece of clean muslin.

  2. Boil the muslin bag in 5 tablespoons of water for 5 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Remove the muslin bag and use the infused water to melt the 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 seeds
Release their aroma and flavour into the water during boiling, giving the sauce its taste.
Butter
Provides richness and a smooth, creamy texture as it melts into the infused water.

The step that matters

Boil the muslin bag for the full 5 minutes. Boiling extracts the aromatic compounds from the seeds into the water. A shorter boil leaves the infusion weak, so the flavour of the finished sauce will be faint.

“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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