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Sauce

Fennel Sauce

A sauce made from boiled fennel, melted butter, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Fennel and butter work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 647 recipes. Both carry anethole, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

Fennel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Strip the leaves from the fennel stems and wash them thoroughly.

  2. Boil the fennel in salted water until tender, about 10 minutes.

  3. Drain and mince the fennel finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Gradually mix the minced fennel with the melted butter.

  2. Add salt to taste.

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. Fennel + buttertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Young fennel
Provides the sweet, aniseed aroma that gives the sauce its flavour.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries the fennel flavour smoothly through the sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually mix the minced fennel with the melted butter.. Adding the butter slowly lets the fat disperse evenly among the minced fennel, so the sauce stays smooth and cohesive rather than greasy or separated.

“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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