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Sauce

Chervil Sauce

A sauce of butter, fresh chervil, and salt, served warm over boiled poultry or fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Chervil and butter work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 805 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Chervil Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Chop fresh chervil finely.

  2. Melt butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  3. Add chopped chervil and a pinch of salt to the melted butter.

  4. Stir well and cook for a few minutes until fragrant.

Serve

  1. Serve warm over boiled poultry or fish.

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. Chervil + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together805 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh chervil
Provides the delicate, fresh herbal aroma that defines the sauce.
Butter
Melts to form the fatty base that carries the chervil flavor and gives the sauce a smooth body.

The step that matters

Cooking the chervil in the butter. Heating over low heat releases the herb's aroma gently. Too much heat can darken the butter and dull the fresh chervil flavor, so cook only until fragrant.

“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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