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Sauce

Venetian Sauce

A creamy sauce made with white sauce, mushroom juice, egg yolks, cream, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Venetian Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the white sauce and mushroom juice. Stir over medium heat for 10 minutes, then remove from heat and let cool slightly.

  2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks and cream together.

  3. Gradually stir a little of the cooled sauce into the egg mixture.

  4. Add the egg mixture to the remaining sauce along with pepper, salt, nutmeg, powdered sugar, and lemon juice.

  5. Stir the sauce briskly over medium heat for 5 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the chopped parsley and stir in a small lump of butter before serving.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 and enrich it through gentle heating and setting.
Cream
Adds richness and smooth texture, cushioning the eggs against curdling.
White sauce
Forms the base of the sauce, giving body and a smooth texture.
Mushroom juice
Adds earthy savoury flavour to the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for a glossy finish and rounded flavour.

The step that matters

Stir the egg mixture into the sauce gradually and keep heat moderate. Egg yolks can scramble if they meet hot sauce too quickly or are overheated. Tempering with a little warm sauce first and stirring over moderate heat lets the yolks thicken the sauce smoothly instead of curdling.

“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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