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Sauce

Egg Sauce

A sweet, thickened sauce made from milk, eggs, sugar, and corn starch, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the sweet milk in a saucepan.

  2. In a bowl, blend the corn starch with a little water.

  3. Stir the beaten eggs and sugar into the hot milk.

  4. Add the corn starch mixture and cook until it thickens slightly.

Finish and serve

  1. Flavor as desired and serve hot.

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 + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base that the sauce thickens and carries flavor.
Eggs
Add richness and help thicken the sauce as they heat.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavor of the sauce.
Corn starch
Thickens the sauce as its granules swell when heated in the liquid.

The step that matters

Cooking after adding the starch. Cornstarch thickens only when the liquid is hot enough for its granules to swell, so cook until the sauce thickens slightly. Stir steadily to prevent lumps and to keep the beaten eggs from curdling with too much heat.

“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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