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Cream Sauce for Fish

A creamy sauce made with egg yolks, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and cream, served with boiled fish.

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 ↓

Cream Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine the egg yolks, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and 1 cup of cream in a saucepan.

  2. Stir over medium heat with a wooden spoon until just before boiling.

  3. Add another ½ cup of cream and stir without letting it boil.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve and serve with boiled fish.

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

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

  3. Pepper + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Lemon + creamtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they gently cook and set, giving it a smooth, creamy body.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a silky mouthfeel and mellowing the lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the cream and yolks.

The step that matters

Stirring over medium heat until just before boiling. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat, but if the sauce boils they can scramble into lumps. Stir constantly and stop heating as it nears boiling; straining through a sieve smooths out any small bits that form.

“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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