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Sauce

Sauce Aux Fines Herbes

A buttery, herb-infused sauce made with finely chopped parsley, chives, shallots, pimpernel, tarragon, chervil, cresses, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 824 recipes mention both. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sauce Aux Fines Herbes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for a minute.

  3. Add the chopped herbs and bouillon, and bring to a boil.

  4. Serve hot.

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.

  1. Tarragon + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together824 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Chive + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together370 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Shallot + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together266 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Chive + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Shallot + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and gives a rich, smooth mouthfeel.
All-purpose flour
Cooked with the butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce.
Parsley
Adds fresh, green herbal flavour as a main herb.
Bouillon
Provides the liquid base that the roux thickens into a sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the roux. Cooking the flour in butter for a minute removes its raw starchy taste and lets it thicken evenly. Adding the liquid too early or without stirring can leave lumps.

Flavor stand-ins for the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, chive, shallot, tarragon, chervil, pepper):

  1. Capersbetter flavor fit
  2. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, chive, shallot, tarragon, chervil, pepper. 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).

“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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