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Sauce

Parsley Sauce

A sauce made by boiling parsley, chopping leaves, and mixing with melted butter, served with boiled fowl and fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Parsley Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the parsley

  1. Wash the parsley in cold water.

  2. Boil the parsley in salted water for 6 to 7 minutes.

  3. Drain the parsley and remove the leaves from the stalks.

  4. Chop the leaves finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir the chopped parsley into the melted butter.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled fowl and fish.

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).

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

What each ingredient does

Parsley
Provides the sauce's fresh herbal flavour and its green colour.
Butter
Carries the parsley flavour and gives the sauce richness and a smooth, coating texture.

The step that matters

Boiling the parsley. Boiling for too long breaks down the chlorophyll that keeps parsley bright green, so the sauce turns dull and olive-coloured. Watch the clock and drain as soon as the time is up.

“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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