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Sauce

Allemande Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, chicken stock, egg yolks, cream, and lemon juice, seasoned with pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Allemande Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and stir for a few minutes without browning.

  3. Gradually add the chicken stock and stir until it boils.

  4. Season with pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

  5. Reduce heat and let it simmer for 30 minutes, then skim off any foam.

Finish and strain

  1. Mix in the egg yolks, cream, and fresh butter, stirring until the eggs begin to set without boiling.

  2. Add the lemon juice and strain through a fine strainer.

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
Enriches the sauce with fat and flavour and helps form the roux base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as a roux with the melted butter.
Chicken stock
Forms the liquid body of the sauce.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the sauce as they gently set.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture.

The step that matters

Mix in the egg yolks without boiling. Egg yolks thicken by gently setting when heated. If the sauce boils after they are added, the proteins can scramble, leaving the sauce grainy and curdled instead of smooth.

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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