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Sauce

Parsley and Butter

A sauce of finely minced parsley mixed with melted butter, served in a sauceboat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Parsley and Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the parsley thoroughly and pick it clean.

  2. Mince the parsley very finely and bruise it to a pulp.

Make the butter

  1. Mix the minced parsley with the melted butter gradually.

Serve

  1. Serve in a sauceboat; do not pour over boiled dishes.

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 + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh parsley
Provides the main flavour and green colour of the sauce.
Butter
Carries the parsley flavour and gives the sauce its rich, smooth body.

The step that matters

Mince and bruise the parsley to a pulp. Finely cutting and bruising the leaves breaks cell walls, releasing more oils and flavour into the butter so the sauce tastes strongly of parsley.

“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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