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Sauce

Hollandaise Sauce

A creamy sauce made from butter, egg yolks, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, salt, and veal stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Hollandaise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Beat the butter to a cream.

  2. Add the well-beaten yolks and beat until light.

  3. Season with salt, cayenne pepper, and lemon juice.

  4. Continue beating and slowly add the heated veal stock.

  5. Place in a double boiler over boiling water and cook, beating constantly until thick and smooth.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove from heat and beat for a few minutes with a whisk.

  2. Serve hot or cold.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + vealtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,580 recipes

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

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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
Provides fat and richness, and gives the sauce a smooth, creamy body.
Egg yolks
Lecithin-rich yolks emulsify the butter and set into a thick, smooth sauce when gently heated.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and balances the sauce's flavor.
Veal stock
Adds savory liquid that loosens the emulsion and deepens the sauce's flavor.

The step that matters

Cooking over the double boiler. Egg yolks scramble if they get too hot. Beating constantly over gentle heat spreads the heat evenly and lets the yolks thicken smoothly into an emulsified sauce.

“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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