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Sauce

Golden Sauce

A sauce made with water, butter, sugar, lemon flavoring, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Golden Sauce

Why it works: Walnut and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,149 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Golden Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, combine water and butter.

  2. Sweeten with sugar to taste and bring to a boil.

  3. Thicken the mixture, then add lemon flavoring.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in the egg yolks, being careful not to let it boil again.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

  2. Walnut + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Enriches and thickens the sauce as they set gently with heat, giving a rich texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety mouthfeel to the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the lemon flavoring.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks off the heat. Egg yolks begin to scramble and curdle when they get too hot, so the sauce must be removed from heat before they are stirred in. Once cooled slightly, the yolks thicken smoothly instead of turning grainy.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Milletfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, lemon, egg. 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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