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Veete Sauce

A green sauce made with butter, flour, white stock, salt, pepper, lemon juice, parsley, and spinach.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Veete Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and stir to form a roux.

  3. Gradually pour in the white stock, stirring constantly until smooth.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

Make the green colouring

  1. Finely chop equal parts of parsley and cooked spinach.

  2. Pound the chopped parsley and spinach in a mortar.

  3. Strain the mixture through cheesecloth to color the sauce green.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Parsley + spinachtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Lemon + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour, giving it a rich mouthfeel.
Flour
Forms a roux with the butter that thickens the stock into a smooth sauce.
White stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it is added to the roux.
Parsley and cooked spinach
Provide the green colour and herbal flavour when strained into the sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually pour in the white stock, stirring constantly until smooth. Adding liquid to a roux all at once or without stirring lets flour clump instead of dispersing evenly. Constant stirring while the stock is added keeps the starch dispersed so the sauce thickens smoothly.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, lemon, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Okrafits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, lemon, parsley. 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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