Name: Egg Sauce
Ingredients: 3 hard-boiled eggs; 1 cup batter sauce; 1 tablespoon lemon juice

Why it works: Egg and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Egg Sauce

Ingredients

3 hard-boiled eggs
1 cup batter sauce
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Directions

Make the sauce

Boil the eggs hard and cut them into small squares.
Mix the egg squares into the batter sauce.
Heat the mixture until very hot.

Finish and serve

Squeeze in the lemon juice before serving.

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 + lemontop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together44,316 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).
Sauce + lemontop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6,598 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Egg + saucetop 39% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together10,895 recipes

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Hard-boiled eggs: Provide the main body and texture of the sauce as chopped pieces.
Batter sauce: Forms the base that carries the egg pieces and gives the sauce its body.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich sauce.