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Sauce

Parsley and Butter

A sauce made by boiling parsley, mincing it, and mixing with melted butter and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Parsley and Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the parsley

  1. Wash and clean the parsley leaves.

  2. Boil the parsley in ½ cup of boiling water with a pinch of coarse sea salt for 10 minutes.

  3. Drain the parsley and mince it to a pulp.

Make the parsley butter

  1. In a sauceboat, mix the minced parsley gradually with ½ cup of thin melted butter until well combined.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Parsley
Supplies the herbal flavour and the green colour of the sauce.
Butter
Carries the parsley flavour and gives the sauce a smooth, rich texture.

The step that matters

Boiling the parsley for 10 minutes. Prolonged heat breaks down the chlorophyll that keeps parsley green, so the butter can turn dull and olive-brown. Watch the time and drain promptly so the herb keeps its fresh colour and flavour.

“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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