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Sauce

Sauces and Catsups

A buttery sauce made with flour, cream, veal stock, lemon or chili vinegar, pepper, salt, parsley, and optional egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Sauces and Catsups

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt butter in a saucepan over medium heat, then blend in flour.

  2. Gradually add boiling cream and veal stock, stirring well.

  3. Allow sauce to simmer for 1-2 minutes between each addition until smooth.

  4. Stir in lemon juice or chili vinegar, pepper, salt, and parsley.

  5. For a richer sauce, whisk in yolks of 2 eggs, reducing the flour by half.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour as the base of the roux.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter into a roux.
Boiling cream
Adds richness and body, softening the sauce's texture.
Veal stock
Supplies savoury depth as the main liquid of the sauce.
Eggs
Optional yolks that enrich and further thicken the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the liquids gradually. Adding boiling cream and stock slowly while stirring keeps the flour-butter roux blended, so the sauce stays smooth instead of lumpy.

“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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