Skip to main content
Sauce

Butterless Sauce

A custard-like sauce made with milk, egg yolks, sugar, and flavoring, finished with folded egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Butterless Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Heat the milk in a double boiler.

  2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with the sugar.

  3. Once the milk is hot, add the egg mixture and cook until thickened like custard.

Cool and finish

  1. Remove from heat and let cool before adding flavoring.

  2. Just before serving, gently fold in the well-beaten egg whites.

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

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

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

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

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

Milk
Forms the liquid base and adds richness to the custard.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as their proteins set when gently heated.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and raises the temperature at which the yolks set.

The step that matters

Cook the egg mixture until thickened like custard. Egg yolk proteins set when heated, but at higher temperatures they tighten and curdle. Cook gently over the double boiler and stir constantly so the custard thickens smoothly instead of turning grainy.

“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