Skip to main content
Sauce

To Make White Sauce for Fowls

A white sauce made from veal, fowl necks, and herbs, thickened with butter and flour and finished with egg yolks and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,467 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Make White Sauce for Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Combine the veal, fowl necks, or bits of mutton or veal with mace, black peppercorns, anchovy, celery, sweet herbs, lemon slice, and water in a saucepan.

  2. Cover and boil until reduced to 2 cups.

Finish the sauce

  1. Strain the mixture and thicken it with butter and flour, boiling for 5-6 minutes.

  2. Add pickled mushrooms.

  3. Mix egg yolks with cream and nutmeg, then stir into the sauce.

  4. Keep stirring over low heat, but do not let it boil.

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. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Mutton + anchovytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Anchovy + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Veal + anchovytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together456 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Enriches the sauce and, with flour, forms the base that thickens it.
Flour
Thickens the strained stock into a smooth, coating sauce when cooked.
Egg yolks
Add richness and, when gently heated, thicken the sauce further.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Keep stirring over low heat, but do not let it boil. Egg yolks begin to set and can curdle or scramble if the sauce gets too hot, leaving it grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, mutton, anchovy, celery, lemon, butter, flour):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, mutton, anchovy, celery, lemon, butter, flour. 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.

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes