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Sauce

Fennel Sauce

A sauce made by boiling fennel, mincing it, and mixing with melted butter and coarse sea 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 stems of the fennel and wash them thoroughly.

  2. Boil the fennel in salted water until tender, about 10 minutes.

  3. Drain the fennel well and mince it finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Gradually mix the minced fennel with the melted butter.

  2. Add a little coarse sea 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

Fennel
Provides the sauce's main aromatic flavour and green herbal character.
Melted butter
Forms the fat base that carries the fennel and gives the sauce its richness and smooth texture.

The step that matters

Draining the fennel well. Excess water left on the minced fennel dilutes the melted butter and can make the sauce watery or cause it to separate. Thorough draining keeps the emulsion of fat and fennel stable and the flavour concentrated.

“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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