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Dessert

Butterless Sauce

A custard-like sauce made from milk, powdered sugar, egg yolks, and egg whites, flavored after cooling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Butterless Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Scald the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Mix the powdered sugar with the egg yolks.

  3. Add the mixture to the boiling milk and stir until thickened like custard.

Finish and serve

  1. Let it cool, then add flavoring of your choice.

  2. Just before serving, gently whisk in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

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

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

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into a custard when heated with the yolks.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they set with heat, giving it a smooth, custard-like body.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the sauce and dissolves easily into the warm milk mixture.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in at the end, they add lightness and an airy texture.

The step that matters

Stirring the yolks into the boiling milk. Egg yolks thicken as their proteins set with heat. If the mixture is added too fast or stirred too little, the yolks can curdle or form lumps. Keep stirring steadily until the sauce coats a spoon.

“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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