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Sauce

A Suggestion As to Vegetables

A sauce made from butter, egg yolks, lemon juice, salt, cayenne pepper, and flour, thickened over a water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,047 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

A Suggestion As to Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Suggest vegetables to serve with various meats.

  2. ARTICHOKES. Boil in salted water, completely covered, until tender. Keep hot. Serve individually with Hollandaise Sauce.

Make the sauce

  1. Gather butter, egg yolks, lemon juice, salt, cayenne pepper, and boiling water.

  2. Rub the butter to a cream in a warm bowl with a wooden or silver spoon.

  3. Add the yolks one at a time, beating fast and well.

  4. Add salt, pepper, and sifted flour.

  5. About five minutes before serving, add the boiling water.

  6. Place the bowl in a sauce pan of boiling water and stir rapidly until it thickens like boiled custard.

  7. Add the lemon juice with the water.

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. See the original page.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together41,227 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour share little aroma chemistry, yet 124,287 recipes mention both: they likely 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
Creamed as the base, giving the sauce its rich body and fat-based smoothness.
Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the sauce as they cook gently, giving it a custard-like set.
Sifted flour
Helps stabilise the sauce so it holds its thickness during gentle cooking.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and egg flavour.

The step that matters

Stirring over boiling water until it thickens. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat, and if the bowl gets too hot or is stirred too little the yolks can scramble into lumps. Keep the stirring rapid and the water at a simmer-level boil so the sauce thickens smoothly like custard.

“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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