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Salad

Egg Sauce

A sauce made from chopped hard‑boiled eggs and melted butter, served with salt fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the hard-boiled eggs and separate the whites from the yolks.

  2. Chop the egg whites and yolks separately, but not too finely.

  3. Mix the chopped whites and yolks together.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine the egg mixture with the melted butter.

  2. Serve with salt fish and add mustard if desired.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + mustardtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,003 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Egg + mustardtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,210 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled eggs
Provide the main body of the sauce, with yolks adding richness and whites adding texture.
Melted butter
Adds fat and moisture, binding the chopped egg into a smooth, spreadable sauce.
Mustard
Adds sharpness and aroma that cut through the richness of the egg and butter.

The step that matters

Chop the whites and yolks separately, but not too finely. Yolks break down more easily than whites, so chopping them separately keeps the whites in distinct pieces. Chopping too finely turns the mixture pasty, while coarse pieces keep a pleasant texture.

Flavor stand-ins for the mustard

The recipe marks mustard as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter):

  1. Asparagusbetter flavor fit
  2. Chivebetter flavor fit
  3. Leekbetter flavor fit
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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