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Very Common White Sauce

A creamy white sauce flavored with lemon rind, mace, parsley, and cream, optionally enriched with boiled chicken liver.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley 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 ↓

Very Common White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Clean the neck and feet of the fowl and stew them in ½ pint of water until reduced to less than ¼ pint.

  2. Add lemon rind, mace, parsley, salt, and peppercorns while stewing.

Thicken and enrich

  1. Strain the mixture and thicken it, then mix in more than ½ cup of cream.

Make the liver sauce

  1. For liver sauce, boil the chicken liver in the gravy for 6 minutes, then mash it into a smooth paste and strain.

  2. Combine the liver paste with the white sauce and add strained lemon juice to taste.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Lemon + chickentop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Parsley + livertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,009 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded body.
Chicken liver
Adds deep savoury flavour and, once mashed, a smooth, thick texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Mashing and straining the liver paste. Liver contains fibres and membranes that stay grainy unless it is mashed fully and then strained. Skipping this leaves the sauce lumpy instead of smooth.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

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

  1. Thymebetter flavor fit
  2. Marjorambetter flavor fit
  3. Tarragonbetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, parsley, cream, liver, chicken. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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