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 for a Salt Cod
Ingredients
Directions
Make the egg sauce
Chop the whites of the hard-boiled eggs, then add the yolks and chop them together, but not too small.
Heat the melted butter in a saucepan until it boils.
Add the chopped eggs to the boiling butter and stir well.
Serve
Pour the egg sauce over the cooked salt cod and serve.
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.
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Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together118,967 recipes
Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
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 and texture of the sauce as they are chopped into the butter.
- Butter
- Melted and boiling, it carries the chopped eggs and gives the sauce richness and a smooth coating.
The step that matters
Adding the chopped eggs to the boiling butter. Stirring the eggs into very hot butter warms them through and blends them into a cohesive sauce. If the butter is not boiling, the eggs stay separate and the sauce will look uneven.
“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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