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Sauce

Sauce Hollandaise Jaune

A yellow hollandaise sauce made with butter, egg yolks, salt, vinegar, and mace, served with poached fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Sauce Hollandaise Jaune

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, combine the butter, egg yolks, salt, and infused vinegar.

  2. Place the bowl over a pot of boiling water, ensuring no water enters the bowl.

  3. Whisk until the sauce thickens to a consistency similar to a thick porridge.

Serve

  1. Serve in a sauceboat with poached fish.

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. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Butter + vinegartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Vinegar + macetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,415 recipes
  5. Egg + vinegartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Butter and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,405 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh butter
Provides fat that gives the sauce its rich, smooth body.
Egg yolks
Their proteins set gently with heat and emulsify the butter, thickening the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Whisking over the water bath. Egg yolks scramble if they get too hot, and the sauce can split if the butter separates. Keeping the bowl above simmering water, never touching it, and whisking constantly lets the yolks thicken gently while the butter emulsifies.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonbetter flavor fit
  2. Parsleybetter flavor fit
  3. Capersbetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, vinegar. 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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