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Sauce

Parsley Sauce

A simple sauce made with butter, flour, boiling water, salt, pepper, lemon juice or vinegar, and chopped parsley.

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 ↓

Parsley Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the butter and flour until smooth.

  2. Stir in the boiling water.

  3. Pour the mixture into a saucepan and cook for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.

Season and serve

  1. Season with salt, white pepper, and lemon juice or vinegar.

  2. Add the chopped parsley before serving.

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. Butter + flourtop 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. White pepper + parsleytop 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).

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
Adds fat and richness to the sauce and carries flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the liquid.
Parsley
Adds fresh herbal aroma and flavour at the end.

The step that matters

Cook the flour and water mixture while stirring constantly. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated in liquid and swells. Stirring constantly prevents lumps and scorching on the base of the pan, giving a smooth, evenly thickened sauce.

Swap the white pepper

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, 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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