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Sauce

Cream Sauce

A simple sauce made with parsley, onion, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and cream or milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Cream Sauce

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix chopped parsley, grated onion, pepper, salt, and nutmeg in a bowl.

  2. Add ½ cup of cream or milk and bring to a boil.

  3. Let it boil for fifteen minutes.

  4. If serving with fresh fish, stir in a little horseradish.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cream or milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and, once reduced, gives it body and richness.
Parsley
Adds fresh, green herbal aroma to the sauce.
Grated onion
Adds savoury, aromatic flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Let it boil for fifteen minutes. Boiling cream or milk reduces it and thickens it as water evaporates. Boiling too long can scorch the dairy on the bottom of the pan, so stir and watch the heat.

Swap the horseradish

The recipe marks horseradish as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, onion, pepper, nutmeg, cream, fish):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, onion, pepper, nutmeg, cream, fish. 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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Whipped 47for Fish 21Mushroom 19Fish 18Lemon 18Horseradish 16 See all 209 →

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