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Sauce

Supreme Sauce

A French velouté sauce thickened with butter, flour, stock, and cream, flavored with peppercorns, parsley, lemon, and optional mushroom trimmings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Supreme Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter in a clean saucepan.

  2. Add the peppercorns and parsley stalks, then stir in the flour.

  3. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly for 10 minutes.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add the stock and stir until it boils.

  2. Add the lemon juice and salt, and if available, some washed and dried white mushroom trimmings.

  3. Pass the mixture through a tammy cloth, then stir in the cream.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and gives it a rich, smooth mouthfeel.
Vienna flour
Thickens the sauce as a roux, with starch swelling in the hot stock to give body.
White stock
Forms the liquid base that the roux thickens into a smooth sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and softens the flavour, giving a smoother, silkier texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the butter and cream.

The step that matters

Cook the roux for 10 minutes. Cooking the flour and butter together while stirring constantly cooks off raw starch taste and prevents lumps. Stirring also keeps the flour from scorching, which would darken and bitter the sauce.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, chicken, cream, parsley):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, chicken, cream, parsley. 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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