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Fish Hollandaise

A sauce of butter, flour, water, and egg yolks flavored with fish, parsley, onion juice, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Fish Hollandaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Sprinkle the fish with parsley, onion juice, and lemon juice.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a chafing dish and mix in the flour.

  2. Add the water and stir until boiling.

  3. Add the salt, pepper, and fish, then cover until heated through.

  4. Carefully stir in the beaten egg yolks.

Serve

  1. Serve 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.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and enrich it with richness and a smooth, velvety texture when stirred in.
Flour
Combines with melted butter to form a roux that thickens the liquid into a sauce.
Butter
Provides fat for richness and carries flour to form the base of the sauce.
Flaked cooked fish
Forms the main body of the dish, heated through in the sauce.

The step that matters

Carefully stir in the beaten egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently, but if the sauce is too hot they can scramble into lumps. Adding them off the heat or with care keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, flour, parsley, lemon, pepper, butter, 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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