Name: Egg Sauce
Ingredients: butter; eggs

Why it works: Butter and egg 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

butter
eggs

Directions

Prepare

Melt some butter.
Boil the eggs until hard.
Soak the eggs in cold water until completely cooled.
Peel the eggs and cut them into large dice.

Assemble and serve

Place the diced eggs in a preheated sauceboat.
Pour the hot melted butter over the eggs and serve.

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.

Butter + eggtop 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

Butter: Melted and poured hot over the eggs, it coats them and adds richness and a smooth fat-based flavour.
Eggs: Boiled until hard, they provide the body of the sauce, with diced pieces holding their shape.

“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.