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Sauce

Good with Boiled Fish

A buttery sauce made with egg yolks, lemon, cayenne, and boiling water, served with boiled fish.

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

Good with Boiled Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the butter until creamy.

  2. Add the egg yolks, lemon juice, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  3. Place the mixture in a vessel over boiling water.

  4. Beat with an egg beater until it thickens.

  5. Gradually add the boiling water while beating continuously.

  6. Cook until the consistency is like thick custard, about 5 to 7 minutes.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy body to the sauce.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they cook gently, giving it a custard-like texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Cook until the consistency is like thick custard, about 5 to 7 minutes.. Egg yolks thicken from gentle heat, but if the heat is too high they scramble into lumps. Beating constantly over boiling water keeps the heat even and the sauce smooth.

“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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