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Sauce

Parsley and Butter

A sauce made by boiling parsley, draining, and mixing with melted butter or gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and parsley 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 and Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the parsley for 3 to 4 minutes, then press out the water thoroughly.

  2. For an improved sauce, use béchamel or white melted butter instead of common melted butter.

  3. Combine the melted butter or gravy with the minced parsley.

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. Butter + parsleytop 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

Butter
Carries the parsley and adds rich, smooth fat to the sauce.
Parsley
Provides the herbal flavour and green colour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Pressing out the parsley water. Boiled parsley holds a lot of water. If it is not pressed dry, the extra liquid thins the butter and can make the sauce watery and separated rather than smooth and clinging.

“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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