Skip to main content
Sauce

Sauce Blanche

A light sauce made from egg yolk, oil, lemon or vinegar, salt, pepper, and mace, served warm with fish or vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Sauce Blanche

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix the egg yolk and salt with a wooden spoon.

  2. Slowly pour in the oil while continuing to mix.

  3. Add the lemon juice or vinegar and pepper, then mix well.

Serve

  1. Warm the sauce on a hot plate before serving with fish or vegetables.

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. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Lemon + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,315 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  5. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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 yolk
Emulsifies the oil into the sauce and gives it a thick, smooth body.
Oil
Provides the fat that makes the sauce rich and creamy in texture.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that cuts the richness of the oil and brightens the flavour.

The step that matters

Slowly pour in the oil while continuing to mix. The egg yolk can only hold the oil in suspension if the oil is added drop by drop at first. Pouring too fast breaks the emulsion, so the sauce separates into a greasy, runny mixture instead of staying thick and smooth.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes