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Egg Sauce

A sauce made from boiled eggs, butter, flour, and boiling water.

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 ↓

Egg Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the eggs for 10 minutes.

  2. Cut the eggs into pea-sized pieces.

  3. Knead the butter with the flour.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir the mixture into the boiling water.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Add the eggs.

  4. Boil for 3 more minutes.

  5. Serve immediately.

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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + buttertop 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

Eggs
Add body and richness, and set firmly when boiled.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Baked flour
Acts as the thickener, as its starch swells in the hot liquid to thicken the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture into the boiling water. Flour clumps when it meets hot liquid without preparation. Kneading it with butter first coats the starch granules with fat, so they separate and disperse evenly as the sauce thickens.

“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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