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Fennel Sauce

A buttery fennel sauce made with flour, water, and fennel, finished with reserved butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and fennel 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

Make the sauce

  1. Melt ¼ pound of butter in a saucepan.

  2. Blend in 2 teaspoons of flour and ⅓ cup of water.

  3. Reserve 1 ounce of butter to stir in later.

  4. Add chopped fennel when the mixture is about to boil.

  5. Simmer for 1-2 minutes without boiling.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove from heat and stir in the reserved butter.

  2. Serve in a tureen.

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. Flour + fenneltop 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. Butter + fenneltop 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

Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as it heats, giving the sauce body.
Fennel
Contributes a mild anise aroma and flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer for 1-2 minutes without boiling. Flour thickens best when heated gently. A hard boil can break the emulsion of butter and liquid and leave the sauce grainy or thin, so keep the heat low enough that it only simmers.

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.

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