Name: Egg Sauce
Ingredients: 4 hard-boiled eggs; ¼ cup melted butter

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

Ingredients

4 hard-boiled eggs
¼ cup melted butter

Directions

Prepare

Boil the eggs until very hard.
Transfer the eggs to cold water to cool.
Shell and chop the eggs finely.

Make the sauce

Combine the chopped eggs with melted butter and mix well.
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.

Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked 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 bulk and body of the sauce, giving it a firm, finely textured base.
Butter: Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel that binds the chopped egg together.