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A beef sauce with onions, eggs, and bacon served with egg balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Share Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the cleaned stocks until tender.

  2. Boil the pickling onions until tender and remove their skins.

  3. Slice the beef and stew it in a sharp sauce for about 10 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, fry the minced onion in butter until brown.

  2. Dust in the flour and let it fry until brown.

  3. Add salt, pepper, and lemon juice to the mixture.

Make the egg balls and serve

  1. In a bowl, crush the hard boiled eggs and mix with salt and half the raw egg yolk.

  2. Form the egg mixture into small balls, about the size of a nutmeg.

  3. Before serving, add the egg balls to the sauce and toss gently.

  4. Fry some bacon slices and serve them with the dish.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Butter
Fat that cooks the minced onion and flour, adding richness and browning.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it fries with the butter and onion.
Hard boiled eggs
Crushed and shaped into balls, giving the dish its body and texture.
Raw egg yolk
Binds the crushed egg mixture so it holds together in balls.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savory sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in the butter and onion. Flour that is cooked too briefly tastes raw and will not thicken well. Cooking it in fat until it turns brown develops flavor and a stable thickened base for the sauce.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, flour, pepper, lemon, 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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