Name: Very Common White Sauce
Ingredients: ½ pint water; 1-2 strips lemon rind; 1 small blade mace; 1-2 branches parsley; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; 6 whole peppercorns; more than ½ cup cream; strained lemon juice (to taste)

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

Clean the neck and feet of a fowl and stew them in ½ pint of water until reduced to less than ¼ pint.
Add lemon rind, mace, parsley, salt, and peppercorns while stewing.
Strain the mixture and thicken it according to the preceding recipe.
Mix in more than ½ cup of cream.
For liver sauce, add the sauce to the liver of the chicken, previously boiled for 6 minutes in the gravy, then bruised to a smooth paste and passed through a sieve.
Add strained lemon juice to taste and stir briskly 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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,268 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,009 recipes
Lemon + macetop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,315 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Parsley + creamtop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6,392 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

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

Tarragonbetter flavor fit
Marjorambetter flavor fit
Thymebetter flavor fit
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, parsley, cream. 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).