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Egg Sauces for Salt Fish

Egg sauce for salt fish is a sauce made from boiled eggs, melted butter, and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Egg Sauces for Salt Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Boil the eggs for 20 minutes until hard.

  2. Place the eggs in cold water for 30 minutes.

  3. Peel the eggs and chop them into small pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter smoothly.

  2. Bring the melted butter to a boil.

  3. Stir in the chopped eggs.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

  2. Add lemon juice 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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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
Provide the body and soft, chopped texture that makes up the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce smooth mouthfeel and buttery flavour.

The step that matters

Bringing the melted butter to a boil. Butter is an emulsion of fat, water and milk solids. Boiling it hard can burn the milk solids and make the fat separate, so heat it only until it is hot and bubbling.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Raspberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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