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Sauce

Egg Sauce for Fish

A sauce made from boiled eggs, butter, and cream, used for fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Egg Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the eggs

  1. Boil the eggs for 10 minutes.

  2. Dip the eggs in cold water to prevent them from turning blue.

  3. Peel and chop the eggs finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir in the butter and cream.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Eggs
Chopped cooked egg gives the sauce body, texture and its characteristic flavor.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel in the sauce.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, thinning the chopped egg into a spoonable sauce.

The step that matters

Dip the eggs in cold water. Overcooked eggs develop a grey-green ring around the yolk from iron and sulfur compounds reacting. Chilling the eggs quickly stops further cooking and prevents this discoloration, which would otherwise show up in the sauce.

“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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