Skip to main content
Sauce

Whipped Egg Sauce

A light sauce made by whisking egg yolk with sherry, water, and sugar over low heat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Whipped Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a flat pan, whisk the egg yolk, sherry, water, and sugar over low heat until frothy and warm.

  2. For a Sabayon Sauce, add a little cream.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce around the pudding.

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. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  2. Sherry + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,141 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Egg + sherrytop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolk
Thickens the sauce as it warms, giving it a light, foamy body.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps stabilise the whisked foam.
Sherry
Adds aroma and a mild acidity that flavours the sauce.

The step that matters

Whisking the yolk over low heat. Egg yolk thickens as it warms, but if the heat is too high it scrambles into lumps. Gentle heat and constant whisking keep the sauce smooth and frothy.

“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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes