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Sauce

Vert Common White Sauce

A clear, herbaceous sauce made from chicken stock, lemon, parsley, mace, and cream, finished with liver paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley 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 ↓

Vert Common White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Clean the neck and feet of a fowl and stew them in 1/2 pint of water until reduced to less than 1/4 pint.

  2. Add lemon rind, mace, parsley, salt, and peppercorns, then strain the mixture.

Finish the sauce

  1. Thicken and flavor the strained liquid with the previous recipe, then mix in more than half the quantity of cream.

  2. Boil the chicken liver in the gravy for 6 minutes, then bruise it to a smooth paste and pass it through a sieve.

  3. Combine the liver paste with the sauce and stir in strained lemon juice before serving.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Lemon + chickentop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Parsley + livertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,009 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Adds richness and body, giving the sauce a smooth, velvety mouthfeel.
Chicken liver
Contributes savory depth and a thick, smooth texture once puréed into the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds brightness and acidity that balances the richness of the cream and liver.

The step that matters

Boiling the chicken liver in the gravy. Liver cooked too briefly stays grainy and raw-tasting, while overcooking makes it tough and bitter. Pressing it through a sieve after cooking gives the smooth texture the sauce needs.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

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

  1. Thymebetter flavor fit
  2. Marjorambetter flavor fit
  3. Tarragonbetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, parsley, cream, liver, chicken. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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