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Sauce

Dutch Sauce

A sauce made with melted butter, egg yolks, salt, cayenne pepper, and lemon juice, thickened over gentle heat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Dutch Sauce

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 ↓

Dutch Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Place the melted butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the yolks of five eggs.

  3. Set the saucepan in a larger pan of hot water and stir with a whisk.

  4. Season with salt and a light dusting of cayenne pepper.

  5. Stir continuously until the sauce thickens, ensuring it does not boil.

  6. Just before finishing, stir in the lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce into a hot sauceboat and serve.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify the butter and thicken the sauce as they set gently with heat.
Melted butter
Provides fat that gives the sauce its rich, smooth body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and egg flavour.

The step that matters

Keep the sauce from boiling. Egg yolks begin to scramble above about 70°C, so the sauce can curdle and turn grainy. Gentle indirect heat from the hot water bath lets the yolks thicken it smoothly.

“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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