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Hollandaise Sauce

A sauce made from butter, egg yolks, lemon juice, salt, cayenne pepper, optionally heavy cream or boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,047 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Hollandaise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the butter and divide it into three pieces.

  2. In a saucepan, combine one piece of butter with egg yolks and lemon juice. Work together until smooth, then set the saucepan over hot water.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir constantly until the butter begins to melt.

  2. Add the second piece of butter, and as the sauce thickens, add the third piece.

  3. Lift the saucepan occasionally from the water to prevent curdling.

  4. Season with salt and cayenne pepper and serve immediately.

Adjust and rescue

  1. If the sauce curdles, add heavy cream or white sauce and beat well.

  2. For a thinner sauce, add boiling water and cook for one minute.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together44,316 recipes

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

Egg and lemon share little aroma chemistry, yet 44,316 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

Butter
Provides fat that gives the sauce its rich body and smooth mouthfeel.
Egg yolks
Emulsify the butter and thicken the sauce as they gently cook.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the richness and helps keep the emulsion stable.

The step that matters

Keeping the heat gentle while adding butter. If the yolks get too hot they scramble, and the emulsion breaks into a curdled sauce. Lifting the pan off the water and adding butter gradually helps control the temperature and keep the sauce smooth.

“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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