Skip to main content
Sauce

Imitation Dutch Sauce

A creamy sauce made with milk, flour, butter, egg yolk, lemon juice, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Imitation Dutch Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the milk with a small amount of cayenne pepper.

  2. Pour the milk into a basin.

  3. Melt the butter in the same saucepan and stir in the flour with a wooden spoon.

  4. Gradually add the boiled milk, stirring continuously.

  5. Once it boils, let it cook for five minutes to ensure the flour is fully cooked.

  6. Add salt to taste.

  7. Remove from heat and stir in the beaten egg yolk and lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve in a sauceboat.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the melted butter and milk into a smooth, pourable sauce.
Butter
Forms the roux with flour and adds richness to the sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the roux thickens.
Egg yolk
Enriches the sauce and adds body when stirred in off the heat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the sauce after the milk is added. Once the milk is added, the sauce must boil and cook for several minutes so the starch in the flour swells and the raw flour taste disappears. Stirring continuously prevents lumps from forming.

“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