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Sauce

Poulette Sauce

A creamy sauce made with chicken stock, lemon juice, egg yolk, cream, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Poulette Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Prepare a white sauce using well-seasoned chicken stock flavored with onions, carrot, celery, salt, and pepper.

Finish and heat

  1. Just before serving, stir in the lemon juice, egg yolk diluted with cream, and chopped parsley.

  2. Cook the sauce over hot water for about five minutes, ensuring the cream and egg are well incorporated.

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. Parsley + peppertop 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. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken stock
Forms the flavorful liquid base that the rest of the sauce is built on.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce, giving it a smooth, velvety body when gently heated.
Cream
Adds richness and softens the sauce, and helps the egg yolk blend in smoothly.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the richness of the cream and yolk.

The step that matters

Cook gently after adding the egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens by gentle heat, but if the sauce gets too hot it can scramble and turn grainy. Diluting the yolk with cream and keeping the sauce over hot water, not boiling, helps it blend evenly and thicken smoothly.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, lemon, egg, cream, pepper):

  1. Tarragonfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Nutmegfits less well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, lemon, egg, cream, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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