Skip to main content
Main

Modern Cookery

A lemon butter sauce with egg yolks, butter, salt, nutmeg, water, cayenne, optional veal gravy, white sauce, mace, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, bring water to a boil and stir in the ingredients until the sauce thickens.

  2. In a bowl, mix the yolks of 3 eggs with the lemon juice, butter, salt, nutmeg, and water.

  3. Gradually stir in the white sauce, then return to the saucepan.

  4. Heat gently, being careful not to boil, and stir in a dessert spoonful of strained lemon juice just before serving.

Serve

  1. Lift cooked meat or chicken from the saucepan, drain, and place in a hot dish.

  2. Pour the sauce over the meat and serve immediately.

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. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  4. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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
Thicken the sauce as they set with gentle heat, giving it a smooth, rich body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Brings acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.
Common white sauce
Forms the base of the sauce and adds body and volume.

The step that matters

Heat gently, without boiling. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heating, but too much heat makes them scramble and curdle, leaving the sauce grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, lemon, butter, nutmeg, pepper, veal, sauce):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, lemon, butter, nutmeg, pepper, veal, sauce. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesBeef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes