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Parsley Sauce

A sauce made with melted butter, parsley, and optional seed or spinach.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Parsley Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare melted butter as a base.

  2. Wash and boil parsley for 8 minutes until tender, then cool in cold water.

  3. Drain parsley and mince it finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Pour boiling melted butter over minced parsley.

  2. If parsley is unavailable, boil parsley seed in water to infuse flavor.

  3. Mix some of this water with flour for the sauce.

  4. For a substitute, chop spinach finely and add to the butter.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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 + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Parsley + spinachtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

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

  3. Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Spinach + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 richness and flavor, and carries the herb aroma through the sauce.
Parsley
Provides the main herbal aroma and flavor of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the liquid.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour with water. Flour clumps if it is not fully dispersed in the liquid first. Starch thickens only as it heats in liquid, so stir the mixture steadily while it warms to keep it smooth.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, spinach, flour, pepper):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, spinach, flour, pepper. 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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