Skip to main content

Very Common White Sauce

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 14,037 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Very Common White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Clean the neck and feet of a fowl.

  2. Stew them in ½ pint of water with lemon rind, mace, parsley, salt, and peppercorns until reduced to less than ¼ pint.

  3. Strain the mixture and thicken it as per the previous recipe.

  4. Mix in ½ cup of cream.

  5. Boil the chicken liver in the gravy for 6 minutes, then mash it into a smooth paste and strain.

  6. Combine the liver paste with the white sauce.

  7. Add 1 teaspoon of strained lemon juice before serving and stir briskly.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Lemon + chickentop 16% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Parsley + livertop 17% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together1,095 recipes

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

  5. Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together4,009 recipes

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

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

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

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

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

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes