Name: Egg Sauce
Ingredients: 2 eggs; 4 oz butter

Why it works: Egg and butter 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 ↓

Egg Sauce

Ingredients

2 eggs
4 oz butter

Directions

Prepare the eggs

Boil the eggs hard.
Soak in cold water, then remove the shells.
Mince the eggs very fine.

Make the sauce

Beat the butter until smooth.
Mix the minced eggs into the butter and warm gently.

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.

Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs: Hard-boiled and minced, they provide body and a rich, savoury texture to the sauce.
Butter: Melted and beaten smooth, it forms the fat base that carries the sauce and gives it richness.