Name: Very Common White Sauce
Ingredients: neck and feet of a fowl, cleaned; ½ cup water; 1-2 strips lemon rind; 1 small blade mace; 1-2 branches parsley; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; 6 corns black pepper; more than ½ cup cream; strained lemon juice (optional)

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 14,037 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Very Common White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the cleaned neck and feet of the fowl in water until reduced to less than ¼ cup.
Add lemon rind, mace, parsley, salt, and pepper while stewing.
Strain the mixture and thicken it according to your preferred method.
Mix in more than ½ cup of cream.
For liver sauce, boil the chicken liver in the gravy for 6 minutes, then puree it to a smooth paste and strain.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together5,324 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Parsley + corntop 12% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together943 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mace, parsley, corn, pepper, cream):

Limeabout as good a flavor fit
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mace, parsley, corn, pepper, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).