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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 the fennel

  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 press out excess water from the fennel.

Make the sauce

  1. Mince the fennel finely and mix it gradually 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 main aromatic flavour and the fibrous body of the sauce.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, coating texture.

The step that matters

Press out excess water from the fennel. Water left in the cooked fennel would dilute the melted butter and can make the sauce thin or split, so pressing it dry helps the fennel bind smoothly with the fat.

“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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