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Sauce Blanche

A light, egg-based sauce seasoned with salt, pepper, mace, and lemon or vinegar, served over fish or vegetables.

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 Blanche

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix the egg yolk and salt with a wooden spoon.

  2. Slowly pour in the oil while continuing to mix.

  3. Add the lemon juice or vinegar and pepper, then the mace.

Warm and serve

  1. Warm the mixture on a hot plate without boiling.

  2. Serve over fish or vegetables.

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. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Lemon + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,315 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  5. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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 yolk
Emulsifies the oil into the sauce, giving it a thick, smooth body.
Oil
Supplies fat that, emulsified with the yolk, gives the sauce its rich texture.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich flavour and helps keep the emulsion stable.

The step that matters

Warm the mixture on a hot plate without boiling. Egg yolk thickens with gentle heat but curdles and turns grainy when it boils, so the sauce must be warmed only gently.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, lemon, pepper. 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.

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