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Claret Sabayon

A claret-based sabayon sauce made with egg yolks, egg white, sugar, lemon rind, and claret.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Claret Sabayon

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sabayon

  1. Beat the yolks of 2 eggs and the white of 1 egg with 2 tablespoons of sugar and the grated rind of 1 lemon until stiff.

  2. Add ½ cup of claret and strain the mixture through a cloth into a saucepan.

  3. Heat the mixture very hot without boiling.

Serve

  1. Serve with hot puddings.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they heat, giving it a rich, smooth body.
Egg white
Adds volume and lightness, helping the mixture stay airy when beaten.
White sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps stabilise the beaten eggs.
Claret
Adds wine flavour and acidity, thinning the mixture into a pourable sauce.

The step that matters

Heat without boiling. Egg yolks thicken as they warm, but past about 70°C they scramble and curdle. Heating gently and stopping before a boil keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar. 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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