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Preserve

Poulette Sauce

A light chicken stock-based sauce flavored with lemon, egg yolk, cream, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Poulette Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, heat the chicken stock seasoned with onions, carrot, celery, salt, and pepper.

  2. Just before serving, stir in the lemon juice, egg yolk diluted with cream, and chopped parsley.

  3. Cook the sauce over hot water for about 5 minutes, ensuring it does not boil.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

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

  5. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken stock
Forms the savory liquid base that the sauce is built on.
Egg yolk
Thickens the sauce gently as it warms and gives it a rich body.
Cream
Adds richness and softens the sauce, helping the yolk blend smoothly.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the richness.

The step that matters

Keep the sauce below a boil after adding the egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens through gentle heating, but if the sauce boils it can scramble, turning grainy and curdled instead of smooth.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Tarragonfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Nutmegfits less well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, lemon, egg, cream, pepper. 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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