Skip to main content
Sauce

Black Butter

A sauce of browned butter, parsley, and vinegar served over boiled fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Black Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a frying pan, melt some butter until it darkens, being careful not to burn it.

  2. Add small sprigs of parsley and let them fry briefly.

  3. Quickly add a little vinegar to the frying pan, heat it, and pour it over the fish.

Serve

  1. Pour the butter and parsley over the boiled fish.

  2. Serve immediately.

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).

  2. Parsley + vinegartop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,477 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Butter + vinegartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Browns and darkens as it cooks, giving the sauce its nutty, toasted flavour and colour.
Small sprigs of parsley
Frying briefly in the hot butter releases aroma and adds a fresh herbal note.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that balances the rich, toasted butter.

The step that matters

Melting the butter until it darkens. Butter solids brown quickly once the water has evaporated, so the sauce can go from nutty to burnt within moments. Watching the colour closely and removing it from the heat at the right point keeps the flavour pleasantly toasted rather than bitter.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Garlicfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Capersfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, vinegar. 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

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes