Skip to main content
Sauce

Melted Butter

A sauce made by melting butter with water, egg yolks, lemon juice, and optional capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Melted Butter

Why it works: Lemon and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,222 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean your saucepan thoroughly.

  2. Add the butter and water to the saucepan.

Make the sauce

  1. Heat over a clear fire until it boils, shaking it gently, ensuring it gets hot but does not color.

  2. Whisk the egg yolks in a bowl, then pour them into the hot butter while beating continuously.

  3. Add a squeeze of lemon juice and capers if desired.

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 + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

Fresh butter
Forms the rich, flowing base of the sauce and carries its flavor.
Egg yolks
Emulsify into the hot butter, thickening it and giving it a smooth, rich body.
Water
Helps the butter heat evenly and keeps it from separating too quickly.

The step that matters

Pouring the yolks into the hot butter while beating. Egg yolks thicken and emulsify when whisked into warm fat. If the butter is too hot or the yolks are added without constant beating, the yolks can scramble and the sauce can split into greasy liquid.

Swap the capers

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Capersthe original

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

More melted butter recipes

Sauce 103Rich 9French 5Sauce for Fish 3White Sauce 3 See all 95 →

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes