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Sauce

Beurre Noir, or Brown Butter

Brown butter is butter browned until it turns brown, then combined with vinegar and optional parsley.

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 ↓

Beurre Noir, or Brown Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter over medium heat until it turns brown but does not burn.

  2. Remove from heat and let it cool slightly.

  3. Heat the vinegar in a separate container until hot but not boiling.

  4. Pour the hot vinegar into the browned butter and heat both together.

Serve

  1. Use the sauce for poached eggs.

  2. Add chopped parsley before serving fish.

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. Vinegar + parsleytop 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
Its milk solids brown when heated, giving the sauce a nutty, toasted flavor and rich fat.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the rich, buttery flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the butter without burning it. Butter's milk solids toast as it heats, creating nutty flavor, but they turn bitter and black once they burn. Watching the colour and removing the pan from heat at the right moment keeps the flavor pleasant.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. 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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