Skip to main content
Main

Sauce Velout&

Velouté sauce is a light, creamy sauce made with butter, flour, stock, egg yolks, lemon juice, parsley, and optional onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sauce Velout&

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour until pale yellow.

  3. Gradually add the stock, stirring until smooth.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in the egg yolks.

Season and serve

  1. If keeping warm, place over hot water without boiling.

  2. Add salt, pepper, lemon juice, and parsley.

  3. If using onion, strain the sauce 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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Enrich the sauce and thicken it gently as it warms, adding richness and body.
Butter
Forms the fat base of the roux and adds richness and flavour.
Flour
Thickens the stock by forming a roux with the melted butter.
Stock
Provides the liquid base that the roux thickens into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Keep the sauce below boiling after adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks coagulate and can curdle or scramble if overheated, so the sauce should be held over hot water rather than on direct heat once the yolks go in.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, flour, pepper, lemon, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, flour, pepper, lemon, parsley. 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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes