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Sauce

Green-butter

A green butter sauce made with spinach, anchovies, parsley, and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Green-butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Ice the butter.

  2. Boil the spinach until tender, drain, and squeeze through muslin to collect the green liquid.

  3. Remove oil from anchovies, pick out bones, and pass through a fine sieve to obtain the pulp.

  4. Finely mince the parsley to fill a generous tablespoon.

  5. Finely mince the capers to fill a heaped teaspoon.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine the ingredients and color the butter as desired.

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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Spinach + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together99 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Spinach + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Butter + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Forms the rich base of the sauce and carries the flavors of the other ingredients.
Spinach
Supplies the green color and a fresh, vegetal flavor to the butter.
Anchovies
Add savory depth and a salty, umami note without tasting distinctly fishy.
Capers
Contribute a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Squeeze the spinach through muslin. Excess water left in the spinach would dilute the butter and dull the sauce's color, so the green liquid must be fully collected before it is combined.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, capers. 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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