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Sauce

Sauce Aux Fines Herbes

A creamy French sauce flavored with onion, garlic, cloves, mace, parsley, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Sauce Aux Fines Herbes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the infusion

  1. Boil the milk with the minced onion, garlic, cloves, mace, and parsley until well flavored.

  2. Strain the milk through muslin.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, mix the butter and flour.

  2. Gradually stir in the strained milk.

  3. Thicken by bringing to a boil.

  4. Strain again.

  5. Add the minced parsley just 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.

  1. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

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

  3. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that is infused with aromatics and thickened into the sauce.
Butter
Combines with flour to form a roux that carries fat and helps thicken the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when the milk is brought to a boil.
Parsley
Contributes fresh, green herbal aroma, added at the end to keep it bright.

The step that matters

Bringing the sauce to a boil. Flour starch only thickens fully once the liquid reaches a boil. Stopping early leaves the sauce thin and tasting of raw flour, while stirring gradually into the butter and flour helps prevent lumps.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, onion, clove, garlic, parsley, butter, flour):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, onion, clove, garlic, parsley, butter, flour. 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.

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