Skip to main content
Main

Fennel Sauce

A butter‑based sauce with flour, water, and chopped fennel, simmered and finished with reserved butter.

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

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 the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Blend the butter and flour together, reserving a little butter to stir in later.

  3. Add the water and bring to a simmer without boiling.

  4. Stir in the chopped fennel just before it simmers.

  5. Simmer for 1-2 minutes, then remove from heat and stir in the reserved butter.

Serve

  1. 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 flavor, and coats the flour to form a smooth base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the warm liquid.
Fennel
Adds a mild, sweet anise-like aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Bring the sauce to a simmer without boiling. Flour thickens as it heats in the liquid. A hard boil can make the sauce lumpy or thin, and it can cause the butter to separate, so heat gently and keep the sauce just below a boil.

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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes