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Sauce

Lemon Sauce

A sweet lemon sauce made with lemon juice, water, sugar, egg yolks, and folded egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Lemon Sauce

Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the base

  1. Juice the lemons and combine with water in a saucepan.

  2. Add the grated lemon peel and sugar, sweetening to taste.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Finish with eggs

  1. Stir in the egg yolks constantly.

  2. Remove from heat and fold in the beaten egg whites immediately.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Lemon juice
Supplies the sour, bright acidity that defines the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon peel
Adds aromatic lemon oils for fragrance beyond the juice alone.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they heat and add richness.
Egg whites
Folded in beaten, they add air that lightens the texture.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks constantly.. Egg yolk proteins set when heated, so they can scramble into lumps if one spot gets too hot. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly so the yolks thicken the sauce smoothly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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