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Sauce

French Sauce

A creamy sauce made with milk, butter, corn starch, egg, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

French Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Dissolve the corn-starch in a little cold milk and add it to the heated milk to thicken.

  3. Stir in the minced hard-boiled egg, white pepper, and salt.

  4. Add the butter and remove from heat.

  5. Gently fold in the beaten egg white.

Serve

  1. 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into a sauce.
Corn-starch
Thickens the hot milk as its granules swell with heat.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds body and a soft, mild egg texture to the sauce.
Egg white
Beaten stiff and folded in, it lightens the sauce's texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the beaten egg white. Beaten egg white holds air in its foam. Stirring it vigorously knocks that air out, so the sauce turns dense and loses its lightness.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, corn, egg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, corn, egg. 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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