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Sauce

Parsley-sauce

A sauce made by boiling parsley, chopping it finely, and mixing it into melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Parsley-sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the parsley

  1. Remove the dead leaves from the parsley and tie it in a bunch.

  2. Boil the parsley in water with a little salt for a short time to preserve its green color.

  3. Chop the leaves finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir the chopped parsley into melted butter.

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 + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Parsley
Provides the main fresh, herbal flavor and the green color of the sauce.
Butter
Carries the flavor and gives the sauce a smooth, rich texture.

The step that matters

Boiling the parsley briefly. Parsley's green color comes from chlorophyll, which breaks down into a dull olive shade with prolonged heat. A short boil in salted water helps the leaves stay bright green, so boil only briefly and move on.

“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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