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Dutch Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, cream, egg yolk, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper, served warm with fish or vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Dutch Sauce

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 ↓

Dutch Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the cream and egg yolk.

  3. Cook gently over low heat for a few moments, stirring carefully.

  4. Add the lemon juice and cayenne pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve warm with fish or dressed 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.

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.

  1. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Butter
Provides fat and rich flavour, and forms the base the other ingredients blend into.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, giving the sauce a softer, smoother body.
Egg yolk
Emulsifies the butter and cream and thickens the sauce as it gently heats.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and egg flavour.

The step that matters

Cook gently over low heat. Egg yolk proteins set at moderate temperatures, so low heat and constant stirring thicken the sauce smoothly, while high heat can scramble the yolk and cause it to curdle.

“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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