Name: Very Common White Sauce
Ingredients: 1/2 pint water; thin strip of lemon rind; 1 small blade of mace; 2 branches of parsley; 1/4 teaspoon coarse sea salt; 6 whole peppercorns; more than 1/2 cup cream; liver of 1 chicken; strained lemon juice to taste

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 ↓

Very Common White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Clean the neck and feet of the fowl and stew them in 1/2 pint of water with lemon rind, mace, parsley, salt, and peppercorns until reduced to less than 1/4 pint.
Strain the mixture and thicken it according to your preferred method.
Mix the strained sauce with more than 1/2 cup of cream.
Boil the chicken liver in the gravy for 6 minutes, then mash it into a smooth paste and pass it through a sieve.
Combine the liver paste with the white sauce and add strained lemon juice to taste, stirring briskly before serving.

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.

Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,268 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Lemon + chickentop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,092 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).
Parsley + livertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,095 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,009 recipes

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

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, parsley, cream, liver, chicken):

Thymebetter flavor fit
Marjorambetter flavor fit
Tarragonbetter flavor fit
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, parsley, cream, liver, chicken. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).