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Chicken Hollandaise

A chicken dish topped with a butter‑based sauce flavored with lemon and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Chicken Hollandaise

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the onion and cook until yellow.

  3. Stir in the flour and gradually add the boiling water or stock.

  4. Add the celery, salt, pepper, lemon juice, and chicken.

  5. Heat thoroughly, then stir in the beaten egg yolks.

Serve

  1. Serve on toast.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main protein and bulk of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Eggs
Egg yolks enrich and thicken the sauce as they heat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks after heating thoroughly. Egg yolks thicken by gently setting as they warm. If the sauce is too hot when they go in, they can scramble into lumps, so stir them in steadily and avoid boiling once they are added.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, celery, butter, flour, pepper, 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.

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