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Parsley and Butter Sauce

A sauce made by boiling parsley, chopping leaves, and mixing with 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 and Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the parsley

  1. Soak the parsley in water for 30 minutes, then wash it well in two more waters to remove grit.

  2. Boil the washed parsley in clean water with a pinch of salt until tender.

  3. Remove the parsley from the water, scrape the leaves off the stalks, and chop the leaves finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the chopped parsley into the melted butter in a saucepan.

  2. Serve the sauce in a sauce-tureen or boat.

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
Adds fresh, green herbal flavour and aroma that brightens the rich butter.
Butter
Provides fat that carries flavour and gives the sauce a smooth, rich texture.

The step that matters

Boil the parsley only until tender. Prolonged boiling breaks down the chlorophyll in parsley, dulling its green colour and washing out some of its fresh flavour, so the parsley should be removed once it is tender.

“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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