Skip to main content
Main

Asparagus with Dutch Sauce

A dish of boiled asparagus served on toast with a creamy Dutch sauce made from butter, flour, milk, stock, lemon juice, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Asparagus with Dutch Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the asparagus

  1. Pick and scrape the asparagus, cut it into equal lengths, and tie it in small bundles.

  2. Soak the bundles in salt water for 2 hours.

  3. Boil plenty of salted water, add the bundles, and cook gently for 15-20 minutes.

  4. Remove the asparagus from the water.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, mix butter and flour.

  2. Add milk and stock.

  3. Stir until it boils.

  4. Add lemon juice, salt, and pepper to taste.

  5. Remove from heat and stir in egg yolks until smooth.

Serve

  1. Dip the toast in the boiling water.

  2. Serve the asparagus on the toast after removing the strings.

  3. Serve the sauce hot alongside the asparagus.

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. Asparagus + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together704 recipes

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Asparagus + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,968 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Asparagus
Forms the main vegetable, cooked gently until tender for serving on toast.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, giving it a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk mixture into a smooth, pourable sauce.
Egg yolks
Stirred in off the heat to thicken and enrich the sauce without curdling.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding softness and body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, buttery sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks off the heat. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat; if added to a boiling sauce they can scramble and turn grainy. Removing the pan from the heat first lets them thicken smoothly.

Swap the asparagus

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

  1. Asparagusthe original
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Spinachfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, milk, flour, egg, lemon, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesAsparagus SoupAsparagus Soup179 recipesAsparagus SaladAsparagus Salad77 recipesCream of AsparagusCream of Asparagus38 recipes