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Sauce

Little White Sauce

A creamy sauce made from chicken broth, corn flour, milk, cream, parsley, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Little White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Simmer bones and leftover chicken in broth for 2-3 hours.

  2. Strain and remove all fat from the broth.

  3. Bring the broth to a boil.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix corn flour with cold milk in a bowl.

  2. Add boiling milk to the corn flour mixture, stirring constantly.

  3. Add the mixture to the boiling broth and let it boil for 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

  4. Stir in cream, chopped parsley, and lemon juice.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Chicken + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,666 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Corn + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together943 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells and sets when heated in liquid.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the sauce and adds body and mild sweetness.

The step that matters

Adding the corn flour mixture to the broth. Corn flour clumps if it hits hot liquid unmixed. Stirring constantly while the mixture boils keeps the starch dispersed so the sauce thickens smoothly.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, corn, flour, milk, cream, lemon):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, corn, flour, milk, cream, lemon. 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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