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Dessert

Lemon Sauce

A sweet lemon sauce made with sugar, butter, egg, lemon juice and rind, simmered over a double boiler.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Lemon Sauce

Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Lemon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Mix the butter and sugar together.

  2. Beat in the whipped egg, lemon juice, lemon rind, and nutmeg, then beat the mixture hard.

Heat and thicken

  1. Place the mixture in a pan, then set that pan in another pan of hot water.

  2. Heat until very hot, but do not boil, stirring constantly.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Nutmeg + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Nutmeg and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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

Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps give it a smooth body.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky texture as it blends with the sugar.
Egg
Thickens the sauce as its proteins set during gentle heating.
Lemon
Adds acidity and bright aroma from the juice and rind.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, aromatic spice that rounds out the lemon.

The step that matters

Heat gently and do not boil. The egg proteins thicken the sauce as they warm, but overheating or boiling can curdle the egg into lumps and leave the sauce grainy. Stirring constantly and using the hot water bath spreads heat evenly and keeps the temperature controlled.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, nutmeg, butter, egg. 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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