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Sauce

Butter Sauce with Eggs

A sweet sauce made from butter, eggs, sugar, and water, flavored to taste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and egg 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 ↓

Butter Sauce with Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Dissolve the sugar in a little water.

  2. Cream the butter and egg yolks together.

  3. Add the dissolved sugar to the butter mixture.

  4. Set the mixture on the stove to boil slowly, stirring almost constantly.

  5. Add your preferred flavoring.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and add richness as they cook with the butter and sugar.
Butter
Adds fat and smooth, rich body to the sauce.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and dissolves into the liquid to season the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil slowly while stirring almost constantly. Egg yolks can scramble if the mixture gets too hot or stops moving. Gentle heat and constant stirring let the yolks thicken the sauce smoothly instead of curdling.

“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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