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Ego Sauce

A creamy sauce made from egg whites, milk, butter, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Ego Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and stir in the flour until smooth.

  2. Add the milk and stir while boiling for 5 minutes.

  3. Roughly chop the whites of the hard-boiled eggs and add to the sauce.

Season and serve

  1. Season with coarse sea salt and cayenne pepper to taste.

  2. Serve in a sauce boat or pour over fowl or fish. Optionally, grate the yolks on top.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour, giving it a rich, smooth body.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter, giving it a smooth, coating texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a creamy sauce.
Hard-boiled eggs
Adds body and a soft, chopped texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter until smooth. Cooking flour in melted butter forms a roux. Stirring it smooth before adding milk prevents lumps, so the sauce thickens evenly.

“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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