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Sauce

To Make Liver-and-pausley Sauce

A sauce made from rabbit liver, parsley, butter, and optional lemon.

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 ↓

To Make Liver-and-pausley 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 some 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.

  2. Squeeze the parsley dry and mince it finely.

  3. Mix the minced parsley with the liver.

Finish the sauce

  1. Stir the mixture into melted butter and warm it without boiling.

  2. Serve the sauce hot, optionally adding grated lemon peel or a squeeze of 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. 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
Provides the main body and rich flavour of the sauce once puréed and sieved.
Parsley leaves
Supply the fresh, green herbal flavour and colour of the sauce.
Melted butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rich texture and carries the flavours.

The step that matters

Warm the sauce without boiling. Boiling can cause the butter to separate and the egg-free emulsion to break, leaving a greasy, grainy sauce. Gentle warming keeps it smooth and glossy.

“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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