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Sauce

Supreme Sauce

A creamy white sauce flavored with peppercorns, parsley, lemon, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Supreme Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a clean saucepan.

  2. Add the peppercorns and parsley stalks, then stir in the flour.

  3. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, for 10 minutes.

  4. Add the stock and stir until it boils.

  5. Add the lemon juice and salt, and if available, some washed and dried white mushroom trimmings.

  6. Finally, add the cream and pass through a fine sieve.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Butter
Forms the fat base that carries the flour and adds richness.
White stock
Provides the liquid that the flour thickens into the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture at the end.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. Stirring constantly over medium heat cooks the raw starch and keeps the roux smooth. Lumps or scorching at this stage cannot be fully removed later, and the flavor and thickening suffer.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, chicken, cream, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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