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Sauce

Common White Sauce

A creamy sauce made from fowl broth, lemon rind, mace, parsley, salt, peppercorns, cream, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Common White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Clean the neck and feet of a fowl and stew them in 1/2 pint of water until reduced to less than 1/4 pint.

  2. Add lemon rind, mace, parsley, salt, and peppercorns, then strain the mixture.

Finish the sauce

  1. Thicken the strained liquid and mix it with more than 1/2 cup of cream.

  2. For liver sauce, boil the chicken liver in the gravy for 6 minutes, then mash it to a smooth paste and strain.

  3. Combine the liver paste with the white sauce and stir in strained 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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,009 recipes
  4. Lemon + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,315 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Parsley + creamtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,392 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Adds richness and body, giving the sauce a smooth, silky texture.
Fowl neck and feet (in the method)
Simmered in water to build a savoury, gelatin-rich base for the sauce.
Chicken liver (in the method)
Mashed into a smooth paste to add depth and a rich, earthy flavour.

The step that matters

Thicken the strained liquid with the cream. Once cream is added, the sauce must be kept below a simmer; boiling can cause the dairy to separate and turn grainy.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, parsley, cream):

  1. Tarragonbetter flavor fit
  2. Marjorambetter flavor fit
  3. Thymebetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, parsley, cream. 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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