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Liver and Parsley Sauce

A sauce made from boiled liver, parsley, salt, and melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and butter 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 ↓

Liver and Parsley Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liver

  1. Wash the liver and boil it in 5 teaspoons of water for 10 minutes.

  2. Chop the liver finely, then pound or bruise it in a small amount of the boiling liquid.

  3. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. Wash and boil the parsley leaves in a little salted water, then drain and chop finely.

  2. Mix the chopped parsley with the liver and add ½ cup of melted butter.

  3. Warm the mixture gently, but do not let it boil.

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 + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

  2. Rabbit + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Rabbit + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl or rabbit liver
Forms the smooth body of the sauce and gives it a rich, savoury flavour.
Melted butter
Adds fat, which makes the sauce smooth and rich in mouthfeel.
Parsley leaves
Contributes fresh, green aroma and a slight herbal bitterness.

The step that matters

Warm the mixture gently, but do not let it boil.. Butter emulsified with liver can separate or turn greasy if overheated, and the egg-free liver proteins can toughen and curdle at high heat. Gentle warming keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the parsley

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, butter. 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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