Name: Fennel Sauce
Ingredients: 1 pint butter sauce; 2 tablespoons chopped fennel (scalded)

Why it works: Butter and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Fennel Sauce

Ingredients

1 pint butter sauce
2 tablespoons chopped fennel (scalded)

Directions

Prepare 1 pint of butter sauce.
Add 2 tablespoons of scalded chopped fennel to the sauce.
Serve primarily with mackerel.

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.

Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together15,338 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Sauce + fenneltop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together181 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Butter + fenneltop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together647 recipes

Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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 sauce: Provides the rich, fatty base that carries the flavour of the fennel.
Fennel: Adds a light anise-like aroma that cuts through the richness of the butter.