Name: Fennel Sauce
Ingredients: 4 cups melted butter; fennel; 2 tablespoons chopped fennel

Why it works: Butter and fennel 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

4 cups melted butter
fennel
2 tablespoons chopped fennel

Directions

Prepare 4 cups of melted butter.
Wash the fennel thoroughly and remove it from the stalks.
Boil the fennel in water until tender, then drain well.
Chop the fennel finely and add 2 tablespoons to the melted butter.

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.

Butter + fenneltop 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

Butter: Melted butter forms the rich fat base that carries the fennel flavour through the sauce.
Fennel: Provides the aromatic, slightly anise-like flavour that defines the sauce.

“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.