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Sauce

White Sauce

A creamy sauce made with cream, flour, butter, shallots, mace, lemon peel, white wine, egg yolk, lemon juice, and anchovy liquor.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,523 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, thicken the cream with flour and butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the minced shallots, mace, and lemon peel; let it boil.

Finish and serve

  1. Before serving, stir in the white wine, egg yolk, lemon juice, and anchovy liquor.

  2. Serve with boiled fowls or in a fricassee.

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. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Flour + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Lemon + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Forms the body of the sauce and carries the other flavours.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a smooth, coating sauce as it heats.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the flour mix smoothly into the cream.
Shallots
Add a mild, sweet onion-like aroma to the sauce.
Egg yolk
Enriches the sauce and adds body when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens by setting when heated, so if the sauce is kept at a boil after it is added, it can curdle or turn grainy. Stir it in off the heat, just before serving, to keep the sauce smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, flour, butter, shallot, lemon, white wine, egg):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, flour, butter, shallot, lemon, white wine, egg. 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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