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Supreme Sauce

A light white sauce made with butter, flour, stock, lemon juice, parsley, white pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley 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

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for 1 minute.

  3. Add the white stock and stir until it boils.

  4. Stir in the lemon juice, parsley, white pepper, and salt.

  5. Cook for a few more minutes, then strain the sauce through a fine sieve.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Parsley + white peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

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

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a smooth sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Butter
Forms the fat base that the flour cooks into, adding richness and smooth mouthfeel.
White stock
Supplies the liquid that the roux thickens into the body of the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour into the butter. Flour must cook briefly after it is stirred into the butter so its raw, starchy taste cooks off. Adding the stock to a raw roux can also leave lumps, so stir steadily as the liquid goes in.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, lemon, 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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