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Sauce

Lemon Sauce

A tart lemon sauce with Worcestershire, salt, and cayenne, served with duck.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Lemon Sauce

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 ↓

Lemon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, combine the lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, coarse sea salt, and cayenne pepper, then mix well.

  2. Transfer the sauce to a mayonnaise dish.

Serve with duck

  1. When serving duck, make a lengthwise cut in the breast with a sharp knife.

  2. Pour a little of the sauce over the duck and serve on very hot plates.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Sauce + peppertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Lemon + saucetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sauce and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,303 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
Provides acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the duck.
Worcestershire sauce
Adds savory depth and a salty, fermented flavour to the sauce.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, pepper):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Mangofits less well
  4. Avocadofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, pepper. 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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