Name: Lemon Sauce
Ingredients: 1 lemon; ½ cup melted butter; optional: finely minced lemon peel

Why it works: Lemon and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Lemon Sauce

Ingredients

1 lemon
½ cup melted butter
optional: finely minced lemon peel

Directions

Pare the lemon and cut it into slices twice as thick as a half-crown piece.
Divide the slices into dice and add them to the melted butter.
Optionally, mince a bit of the lemon peel very fine and add it to the mixture.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lemon: Supplies sharp acidity and bright citrus aroma, with the peel adding more fragrance.
Melted butter: Provides fat and a smooth, rich mouthfeel that carries the lemon flavour.

“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.