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Sauce

To Be Used with Boiled Fish

A buttery sauce with egg yolks, mustard, and lemon, served with boiled fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,816 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

To Be Used with Boiled Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a double boiler.

  2. Slowly stir in the raw egg yolks.

  3. Add the fish cooking water, salt, and lemon juice.

  4. In a separate bowl, mix the hard-boiled egg yolks with the mustard.

  5. Combine the two mixtures and serve with boiled fish.

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 + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Fish + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,889 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Raw egg yolks
Thicken the warm butter into a smooth, emulsified sauce.
Unsalted butter
Provides richness and a smooth, creamy body to the sauce.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add a dry, rich body that helps stabilise the sauce's texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and egg flavours.
English mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that cuts through the richness.

The step that matters

Slowly stir in the raw egg yolks. Adding raw yolks to hot butter too quickly can scramble them. Adding them slowly while stirring lets the yolk proteins emulsify into the fat, giving a smooth sauce rather than curdled bits.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

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

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