Skip to main content
Sauce

Hollandaise Sauce

A sauce made from béchamel, lemon juice, parsley coloring, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 14,037 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Hollandaise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Bring the béchamel sauce to a boil and let it simmer.

  2. Add the salt, cayenne, and parsley coloring.

  3. Just before serving, stir in the lemon juice.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Sauce + parsleytop 23% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together6,693 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sauce + peppertop 27% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together15,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sauce and pepper share little aroma chemistry, yet 15,303 recipes mention both: they likely 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

Béchamel sauce
Forms the thick, creamy base that the other flavorings are stirred into.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and cuts the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the lemon juice just before serving. Acid added too early can thin or curdle a cooked sauce and dull its flavor. Adding it at the end keeps the sauce smooth and the lemon taste fresh.

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, parsley, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limeabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, parsley, pepper. 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.

More hollandaise sauce recipes

Mock 3 See all 212 →

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes