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Sauce Allemande.

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, chicken stock, eggs, cream, lemon juice, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 Allemande.

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux and base

  1. Melt 1½ ounces of butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add 1 ounce of flour and stir for a few minutes without browning.

  3. Pour in ½ pint of chicken stock and stir until it boils.

  4. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and grated nutmeg.

Simmer and skim

  1. Let the sauce simmer for 30 minutes.

  2. Skim off any fat that rises to the surface.

Finish the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix 2 egg yolks, 1 tablespoon of cream, and ½ ounce of fresh butter.

  2. Stir this mixture into the sauce over low heat until it thickens, but do not let it boil.

  3. Add 1 tablespoon of lemon juice.

  4. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries flavour and fat, enriching the sauce and giving it a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Cooked with butter, its starch thickens the stock into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Chicken stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and supplies savoury flavour.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce when gently heated, adding body and a velvety texture.
Cream
Adds richness and softness, rounding the texture of the finished sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the butter and yolks.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk mixture. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat. If the sauce boils after they go in, the proteins scramble and curdle, leaving a grainy texture. Keep the heat low and stir steadily until the sauce just thickens.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, chicken, pepper, nutmeg, egg, cream):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Raisinfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, chicken, pepper, nutmeg, egg, cream. 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.

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