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Sauce

Hollandaise Sauce

A rich, buttery sauce made with egg yolks, lemon juice, and water, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 27,047 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Hollandaise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  2. Add the flour, salt, pepper or paprika, and lemon juice or tarragon vinegar.

  3. Slowly add the boiling water while stirring until the mixture thickens.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in the beaten egg yolks.

Serve

  1. Serve from a sauce boat.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together41,227 recipes

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

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour share little aroma chemistry, yet 124,287 recipes mention both: they likely 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
Provides fat and richness, giving the sauce its smooth, creamy body.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it holds together rather than running thin.
Egg yolks
Emulsify and thicken the sauce, adding richness and body when stirred in off heat.
Lemon juice or tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the richness of the butter and yolks.

The step that matters

Remove from heat and stir in the beaten egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken at moderate heat but scramble if too hot. Taking the sauce off the heat before adding them lets them thicken gently and smoothly without curdling.

“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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