Name: Sauce Maître d'Hôtel
Ingredients: 2 ounces butter; 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley; salt to taste; pepper to taste; a pinch of nutmeg; finely chopped spring onions (optional); lemon juice to taste

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 14,036 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, fish (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Also mentioned in the method: fish

Directions

Make the sauce

In a hot dish, combine the butter and parsley until well mixed.
Add salt, pepper, nutmeg, and spring onions, ensuring they are finely chopped.

Serve

Place your fish or meat over the sauce.
Squeeze a little lemon juice over the top before serving.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together14,036 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together34,118 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + lemontop 2% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together27,039 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together5,062 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Nutmeg + lemontop 4% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together11,318 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter: Melts into the dish to carry the flavour and give the sauce a rich, smooth body.
Parsley: Adds fresh, herbal aroma and a bright green flavour that cuts through the butter.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that lifts the rich butter and balances the savoury flavours.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, pepper, nutmeg, lemon):

Carrotbetter flavor fit
Potatobetter flavor fit
Capsicumbetter flavor fit
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, pepper, nutmeg, lemon. 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.