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Egg Sauce

A sauce made with butter, flour, nutmeg, salt, pepper, boiling water, egg yolks, butter, lemon juice, and chopped hard-boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix together the butter, flour, nutmeg, salt, and pepper without melting the butter.

  2. Add the boiling water and stir with a whisk until the sauce is smooth.

  3. Boil for a moment.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the yolks of two eggs, additional butter, and lemon juice.

  2. Press the mixture through a wet cloth.

  3. Add the chopped hard-boiled eggs.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, giving it a smooth, rich texture.
Flour
Thickens the sauce, giving it body as it cooks with the boiling water.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the sauce, adding richness and body when stirred in.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the yolks without boiling. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat and can scramble or curdle if the sauce is boiling hard. Keep the sauce hot but off a rolling boil when the yolks go in.

“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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