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Butter Sauce for Boiled Fish

A butter sauce with flour and salt, served over boiled fish and chopped hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Butter Sauce for Boiled Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Beat the butter until creamy.

  2. Mix in the flour and salt.

Cook the fish and eggs

  1. Boil the fish while preparing the sauce.

  2. Boil the eggs for 10 minutes, then cool, shell, and chop them small.

Make and serve the sauce

  1. Just before serving, add 1 cup of boiling water to the butter mixture and stir over heat until it thickens.

  2. Keep the sauce hot but do not let it boil.

  3. Pour the sauce over the chopped eggs in a serving dish and stir to combine.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Provides richness and fat, giving the sauce its smooth, creamy body and flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Hard-boiled eggs
Chopped pieces add texture and mild richness to the sauce and fish.

The step that matters

Keep the sauce hot but do not let it boil.. Flour-thickened sauces need enough heat for the starch to swell fully, but boiling can make the butter separate and the sauce grainy or lumpy. Gentle, steady heat keeps it 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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