Skip to main content
Sauce

Parsley Sauce

A simple sauce made with butter, flour, water, parsley, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Parsley Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and stir to combine.

  3. Gradually add the water, stirring until smooth.

Finish the sauce

  1. Wash the parsley, removing dead leaves and stalks, then dry it.

  2. Chop the parsley finely and stir it into the sauce.

  3. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt 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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour while it melts into the roux.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter and liquid, giving it body.
Parsley
Adds fresh herbal aroma and flavour to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually add the water, stirring until smooth. Adding liquid slowly while stirring lets the starch in the flour-butter roux disperse evenly. Adding it all at once can trap lumps of flour that stay stuck in the sauce.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Turmericfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Sagefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes