Name: Very Common White Sauce
Ingredients: 1/2 pint water; 1-2 strips lemon rind; 1 small blade mace; 2 small branches parsley; 1/4 teaspoon coarse sea salt; 6 whole peppercorns; more than 1/2 cup cream; juice of 1 lemon

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

Make the stock

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

Finish the sauce

Thicken the strained liquid and mix it with more than 1/2 cup of cream.
For liver sauce, boil the chicken liver in the gravy for 6 minutes, then mash it into a smooth paste and strain.
Add the liver paste to the 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together4,268 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together4,009 recipes
Lemon + macetop 18% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together6,315 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Parsley + creamtop 29% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned 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 thickened sauce a smooth, silky texture.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the cream.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

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

Tarragonbetter flavor fit
Marjorambetter flavor fit
Thymebetter flavor fit
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.