Name: Parsley Sauce
Ingredients: 3 tablespoons finely chopped parsley; good white sauce; a little green food coloring

Why it works: Parsley and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,693 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Parsley Sauce

Ingredients

3 tablespoons finely chopped parsley
good white sauce
a little green food coloring

Directions

Prepare a good white sauce.
Add 3 tablespoons of finely chopped parsley and a little green food coloring.
Bring the mixture to a 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.

Parsley + saucetop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6,693 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Parsley: Provides a fresh, herbal flavor and the main green color of the sauce.
White sauce: Forms the creamy base that carries the parsley and gives the sauce its body.

“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.