Name: Sauce Hollandaise
Ingredients: ¼ pound butter; 1 handful table salt; parsley (chopped); chives (chopped); salt (to taste); pepper (to taste); lemon (a dash)

Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Sauce Hollandaise

Ingredients

Directions

Melt the butter in a saucepan over moderate heat.
Add chopped parsley and chives, along with salt, pepper, and a dash of lemon.
Whip the mixture with a fork until frothy.
Pour into a warm sauce tureen and serve with boiled 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.

Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Parsley + chivetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,150 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Chive + lemontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,122 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter: Provides fat that gives the sauce a rich, smooth, mouth-coating texture.
Lemon: Adds acidity that brightens and balances the rich butter.

Flavor stand-ins for the chive

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

Shallotbetter flavor fit
Carrotbetter flavor fit
Spinachabout as good a flavor fit
Chivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, pepper, lemon. 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.