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Sauce

Supreme Sauce

A velvety sauce made from veal and chicken stock thickened with white roux and flavored with parsley, cress, tarragon, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Supreme Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the stock in a saucepan until hot.

  2. Thicken the stock with white roux, stirring until smooth and it coats the spoon.

Add herbs and seasoning

  1. Blanch the herbs in scalding water for 2 minutes, then drain and finely mince them.

  2. Stir 2 teaspoons of the chopped herbs into the sauce, along with salt and white pepper.

  3. Before serving, carefully add 2 teaspoons of strained lemon juice to the sauce.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Tarragon + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Veal + chickentop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-butanedione (buttery, creamy).

  5. Parsley + white peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal and chicken stock
Forms the liquid base that the roux thickens into a sauce.
White roux
Thickens the stock so the sauce coats the spoon.
Parsley, cress, and tarragon leaves
Provide fresh herbal flavour and colour to the finished sauce.
Strained lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the lemon juice before serving. Acid added late keeps its bright flavour; heating it for long can dull the taste. Adding it carefully and near the end keeps the sauce fresh and balanced.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, chicken, parsley, tarragon, lemon):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Basilfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, chicken, parsley, tarragon, lemon. 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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