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Sauce

Modern Cookery

A lemony butter sauce thickened in boiling water, optionally enriched with veal gravy and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Bring water to a boil in a saucepan.

  2. Whisk together egg yolks, lemon juice, butter, salt, nutmeg, and water in a bowl.

  3. Stir the mixture constantly in the boiling water until the sauce thickens.

Serve

  1. For a richer sauce, substitute water with veal gravy mixed with parsley when serving with boiled veal or calf's head.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and add richness as they set when gently heated.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rich texture and silky mouthfeel.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the butter and yolks.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture constantly in the boiling water. Egg yolks can scramble if they get too hot or heat unevenly. Constant stirring spreads the heat and lets the yolks thicken smoothly into a sauce.

“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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