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Lemon Sauce

A lemon sauce made with margarine, flour, water or fish stock, milk, lemon juice, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Lemon Sauce

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lemon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the margarine in a pan.

  2. Add the flour and blend together without browning.

  3. Heat the milk and water (or fish stock) and add to the flour mixture, stirring quickly.

  4. Stir until it boils, then boil for three minutes.

  5. Add seasoning and the juice of half a lemon.

Serve

  1. Use some sauce to mix with the fish and serve the remainder with the pie.

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

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

  2. Fish + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lemon + fishtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,889 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Margarine
Melts to form the fat base that the flour is cooked into.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked in fat and combined with liquid.
Milk
Adds body and creaminess to the sauce as the liquid base.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the hot liquid to the flour mixture. Stirring quickly while pouring the liquid in helps the flour disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly without lumps.

“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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