Skip to main content
Sauce

Fennel Sauce

A sauce made from boiled fennel, butter, flour, and optional gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Fennel and flour work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 455 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fennel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fennel

  1. Wash the fennel thoroughly.

  2. Strip the leaves from the stems.

  3. Boil the fennel until tender.

  4. Drain the fennel in a sieve and press out excess water.

  5. Mince the fennel finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir the minced fennel into melted butter.

  2. Serve with veal or boiled mackerel, or mix into thickened gravy.

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. Fennel + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together455 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Fennel + buttertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Fennel
Provides the main flavour and the bulk of the sauce once minced.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the fennel flavour through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when used in the gravy.

The step that matters

Press out excess water after boiling. Boiled fennel holds a lot of water. If it is not pressed dry, it dilutes the butter and makes the sauce thin and watery instead of thick and spoonable.

Swap the fennel

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

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Fennelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour. 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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes