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An Egg Sauce to Serve with Baked Fish

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, egg yolk, fish stock, and hard‑boiled eggs, served over baked fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

An Egg Sauce to Serve with Baked Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, rub together the butter, flour, and beaten egg yolk.

  2. Pour in the water from the boiled fish, stirring until smooth.

  3. Add salt and pepper, then let it boil for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in the chopped hard boiled eggs and parsley.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

Egg yolk
Enriches the sauce and helps it thicken and turn rich and smooth.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, body-rich sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a silky mouthfeel in the sauce.
Hard boiled eggs
Adds texture and egg flavour as chopped pieces folded into the sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling with constant stirring. Once the flour and yolk are in, the sauce must boil while stirred so the starch thickens evenly and the yolk does not scramble or form lumps.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, butter, flour, egg, pepper):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Tarragonfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, butter, flour, egg, pepper. 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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