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Sauce

Hollandaise Sauce for Baked Fish

A creamy sauce made from butter, egg yolks, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and boiling water, served over baked fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Hollandaise Sauce for Baked Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, cream the butter with a spoon.

  2. Add the egg yolks one at a time, beating well after each addition.

  3. Stir in the lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and boiling water.

  4. Place the bowl over a pan of boiling water and stir rapidly until thickened like custard.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce around the baked 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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + buttertop 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. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

Lemon and egg 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

Egg yolks
Emulsify with the butter and thicken the sauce as they set with gentle heat.
Butter
Provides fat that gives the sauce its rich texture and smooth body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps balance the richness.

The step that matters

Thickening over the pan of boiling water. Egg yolks scramble if they get too hot. Stir rapidly over simmering water, keeping the bowl off the direct heat, so the yolks thicken smoothly into a custard-like sauce.

“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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