Skip to main content
Sauce

Poulette Sauce

Poulette sauce is a velouté-based sauce thickened with egg yolks, lemon juice, and cream, finished with mushrooms, shallots, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Poulette Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix the egg yolks, lemon juice, and cream.

  2. Gradually stir this mixture into the boiling Veloute sauce until it thickens.

  3. Return the sauce to the saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the mushrooms, shallots, and parsley, then heat until hot.

  2. 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.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Mushroom + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 heat and enrich its texture.
Veloute sauce
Forms the base body and flavour that the rest of the sauce is built on.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich egg and cream mixture.
Chopped cooked button mushrooms
Contribute earthy flavour and a soft, meaty bite.
Shallots
Add a mild onion-like sweetness and aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually stir the egg mixture into the boiling Veloute. Egg yolks can scramble and curdle if they meet hot liquid too quickly. Adding the mixture slowly while stirring evenly shares out the heat, so the yolks thicken the sauce smoothly instead of setting in lumps.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, cream, mushroom, shallot, parsley, sauce):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, mushroom, shallot, parsley, 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

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