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Sauce for Baked White Fish

A buttery sauce with lemon, egg yolks, cayenne, salt, and boiling water for baked white fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Sauce for Baked White Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Beat the butter until creamy.

  2. Add the egg yolks one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  3. Stir in the lemon juice, cayenne pepper, salt, and boiling water.

Thicken the sauce

  1. Place the bowl over boiling water and beat until the sauce thickens to a custard-like consistency.

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 + peppertop 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. Lemon + eggtop 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).

Lemon and egg 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

Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy body to the sauce.
Egg yolks
Emulsify the butter and set as they heat, thickening the sauce into a custard.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and egg flavour.

The step that matters

Thickening over boiling water. Egg yolk proteins set gently around 65 to 70°C. Beating the sauce continuously over the heat spreads that warmth evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of curdling into scrambled bits.

“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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