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Maitre-d’Hotel Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, herbs, flour, stock, and egg yolks, thickened with cornflour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 14,036 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Make the maitre d'hotel butter

  1. Melt the butter with parsley, thyme, onion, pepper, and salt in a saucepan over low heat until simmering.

  2. Remove from heat and serve the sauce.

Make the flour base

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, parsley, and salt with cold water to form a smooth paste.

  2. Add the paste to boiling water in a saucepan and stir until thick.

  3. Remove from heat, add lemon juice, and serve.

Thicken with cornflour and egg yolks

  1. Mix 2 tablespoons of stock with cornflour to make a paste.

  2. Boil the remaining stock, then stir in the cornflour paste and cook for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.

  3. Beat egg yolks with maitre-d'hotel butter, then gradually stir into the boiling mixture.

  4. Place the saucepan in a larger saucepan of boiling water and stir until thickened.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together14,036 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Thyme + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,118 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,039 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, giving it a rich, smooth mouthfeel.
All-purpose flour
Forms a paste that thickens the sauce as it heats in boiling water.
Cornflour
Thickens the stock by swelling with heat, giving the sauce body.
Egg yolks
Add richness and further thicken the sauce as they set gently with heat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk butter to the sauce. Egg yolks scramble if they get too hot too fast. Stirring them in gradually, off direct heat in a water bath, lets them thicken the sauce smoothly.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

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

  1. Carrotbetter flavor fit
  2. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  3. Potatobetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, thyme, pepper, flour, lemon, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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