Skip to main content
Sauce

Milk and Egg Sauce,

A thickened milk sauce with egg yolk, used for fish, fowls, and macaroni.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Milk and Egg Sauce,

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the batter and flour in a saucepan.

  2. Add the milk and heat while stirring constantly until it thickens slightly.

  3. Beat the egg yolk with the water and mix it into the sauce, ensuring it does not boil but is very hot.

Finish and serve

  1. For fish, add vinegar or lemon juice and grated peel, and optionally chopped parsley.

  2. For boiled fowls, add chopped oysters.

  3. For macaroni, layer it with grated cheese and pour the sauce over before baking.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Fish + oystertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together496 recipes

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

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + fishtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Egg + oystertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 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

Batter
Provides body and starch that help thicken the sauce as it heats.
Flour
Thickens the milk by swelling its starch as the sauce heats.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the thickening.
Egg yolk
Enriches the sauce and helps it set to a smooth, creamy texture when heated gently.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk. If the sauce boils after the egg yolk goes in, the egg proteins can scramble and make the sauce grainy. Keep it very hot but below a boil, and stir well.

“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

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesBread SauceBread Sauce7 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipes