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Allemande Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, broth, egg yolks, salt, pepper, and finished with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Allemande Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter in a thick saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and stir for one minute.

Make the sauce

  1. Gradually pour in the hot broth or stock while stirring continuously.

  2. Let it boil, then remove from heat and wait one minute.

  3. Stir in the egg yolks, salt, and pepper gradually.

  4. Return to heat, stirring carefully until it reaches boiling point without boiling.

  5. Remove from heat and stir in the additional tablespoon of butter.

  6. If too thick, add a little broth or hot water.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 with fat and adds a rich, smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth sauce when cooked with the butter.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they heat and add richness and a silky texture.
Hot broth or white stock
Forms the liquid base that the thickened sauce is built on.

The step that matters

Return to heat without boiling. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat, but if the sauce boils after they are added they can scramble and curdle, leaving the sauce grainy and thin.

“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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