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Sauce

Parsley Sauce

A simple sauce made with water, butter, pepper, salt, and parsley, thickened with batter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Parsley Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a small saucepan, combine the water, butter, pepper, and salt, then bring to a boil.

  2. Thicken the mixture with batter.

Finish and serve

  1. Let it cook gently for fifteen minutes.

  2. Stir in the finely chopped parsley 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.

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

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

  2. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Batter
Starch thickens the hot liquid into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Butter
Fat adds richness and a rounded, smooth mouthfeel to the sauce.
Parsley
Adds fresh, green aroma and flavour to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken with batter. Starch needs heat to swell and thicken. Adding batter to boiling liquid can clump if not evenly dispersed, and the gentle simmer afterward lets the starch fully hydrate for a smooth texture.

“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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