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Sauce

Black Butter Sauce

A sauce made with browned butter, parsley, vinegar, flour, water, salt, pepper, lemon juice, and additional butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Black Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the brown butter

  1. Warm the butter in a frying pan until it turns brown.

  2. Add the parsley and heat for 1 minute.

  3. Carefully drop in the vinegar.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt 2 ounces of butter and stir in the flour.

  2. Moisten with 1 quart of water, adding salt and pepper.

  3. Let it simmer for 30 minutes or until thickened.

  4. Gradually add ½ ounce of butter, stirring until the mixture becomes white.

  5. Squeeze in the juice of 1 lemon and stir well.

  6. Strain through a fine sieve and serve.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Browns to give the sauce its nutty, toasted flavour and rich fat base.
Flour
Thickens the water into a smooth, lightly bound sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, browned butter.

The step that matters

Warm the butter in a frying pan until it turns brown.. Butter solids darken quickly once the water has evaporated, so the butter can move from browned to burnt in seconds. Burnt butter tastes bitter and spoils the whole sauce, so watch it closely and remove it from the heat at the right colour.

“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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