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Butter Sauce for Boiled Fish

A creamy butter sauce with flour, salt, eggs, and boiling water, served over boiled fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 sauce base

  1. Beat the butter until creamy.

  2. Mix in the flour and salt.

Prepare the eggs

  1. Boil the eggs for 10 minutes.

  2. Cool the eggs.

  3. Shell the eggs.

  4. Chop the eggs.

Make and serve the sauce

  1. Pour boiling water over the butter mixture.

  2. Stir over heat until it thickens.

  3. Keep the sauce hot but do not boil.

  4. Pour the sauce over the chopped eggs in a serving dish.

  5. 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 fat and richness, giving the sauce its smooth body and flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and water, giving it body.
Eggs
Add body and richness to the sauce and give texture through the chopped pieces.

The step that matters

Keep the sauce hot but do not boil. Once the sauce boils, the egg proteins can scramble and the flour-thickened sauce can become grainy or separate, so heat must stay gentle.

“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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