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Cream Sauce for Fish

A creamy sauce made with butter, egg yolks, lemon, salt, cayenne, and hot water, served over fish.

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 ↓

Cream Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, combine the creamed butter, beaten egg yolks, lemon juice, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Slowly add the hot water while mixing well.

  3. Place the bowl in a saucepan of hot water on the stove.

  4. Stir until the sauce thickens to a cream consistency. Do not let it boil.

  5. Remove from heat and beat for a few moments.

Finish and serve

  1. If the sauce is too thick, thin it with sweet cream before serving.

  2. Serve in a sauceboat and garnish with chopped parsley and slices of hard-boiled egg.

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 + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they gently cook and set, giving it a rich, smooth body.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel that carries the flavour of the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and egg flavour.

The step that matters

Stir until the sauce thickens, without boiling. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat, but if they get too hot they scramble and curdle. Keeping the bowl over hot water, not boiling, lets the sauce thicken smoothly into a cream consistency.

“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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