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Italian Sauce

A buttery mushroom sauce flavored with parsley, thyme, lemon, garlic, and consommé.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Italian Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop parsley, lemon, thyme, and mushrooms very finely.

Make the sauce

  1. In a small saucepan, melt a bit of butter and add the chopped ingredients and garlic.

  2. When the butter begins to fry, add 2-3 tablespoons of good consommé and let it stew until thick.

  3. Remove the garlic and mix in some butter sauce.

  4. Heat the sauce and squeeze in a little lemon juice before serving.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Parsley + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Provide bulk and earthy flavour that forms the body of the sauce.
Consommé
Supplies liquid that reduces and thickens into a savoury base for the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the aromatics, giving the sauce a rounded mouthfeel.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity at the end to brighten the richness of the butter and mushrooms.

The step that matters

Let the consommé stew until thick. Cooking the liquid down concentrates its flavour and lets it reduce to a sauce texture. Stop too early and the sauce stays thin; cook too long and it can become overly salty or sticky.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, lemon, thyme, mushroom, butter, garlic):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Rosemaryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, lemon, thyme, mushroom, butter, garlic. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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