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Sauce

To Make Liver-and-parsley Sauce

A sauce made by boiling rabbit liver, mixing with parsley, butter, and optional lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

To Make Liver-and-parsley Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liver

  1. Boil the rabbit's liver in water for 5 minutes.

  2. Mince the liver and bruise it in a mortar with a little of the boiling liquid.

  3. Rub the mixture through a sieve.

Prepare the parsley

  1. Boil the parsley leaves in water with salt until tender, then squeeze dry and mince finely.

Make and serve the sauce

  1. Mix the minced parsley with the liver and stir into melted butter.

  2. Warm the sauce gently without boiling and serve hot.

  3. Optionally, add grated lemon peel or a squeeze of lemon juice 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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Rabbit + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together626 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Rabbit + livertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

  4. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

  5. Rabbit + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit's liver
Forms the smooth, thick body of the sauce once mashed and sieved.
Parsley leaves
Adds fresh, green flavour and bulk to the sauce.
Melted butter
Adds richness and a silky texture that carries the flavours.

The step that matters

Warm the sauce gently without boiling. Butter-based sauces containing egg or proteins can separate or turn grainy when overheated. Gentle heat keeps the emulsion smooth and the flavour fresh.

“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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