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Parsley Sauce

A sauce of boiled parsley mixed with melted butter, served with boiled fowl or fish.

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 ↓

Parsley Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the parsley

  1. Boil the parsley leaves in salted water for seven minutes.

  2. Drain and chop the leaves finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the chopped parsley into the melted butter.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled fowl or 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. 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

Fresh parsley leaves
Provides the main herbal aroma and the green colour of the sauce.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying the parsley flavour smoothly through the sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling the parsley for seven minutes. Prolonged boiling breaks down chlorophyll, which dulls the bright green colour and can weaken the fresh herb flavour, so the leaves should be cooked only as long as the method states.

“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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