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Dessert

Milk Sauce

A sweet sauce made from milk, sugar, eggs, and vanilla, finished with folded egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Milk Sauce

Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Milk Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Beat the egg yolks and sugar together.

  2. Heat the milk in a saucepan until it boils.

  3. Add the yolk and sugar mixture to the boiling milk and simmer for about 5 minutes.

  4. Stir in the vanilla.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, fold in the 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps stabilize the beaten egg yolks.
Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the sauce as they heat, and beaten whites add lightness.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the egg yolks thicken into a sauce.
Vanilla
Adds aroma and a rounded flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmering the yolk mixture in the milk. Egg yolks thicken as their proteins set with heat, but overheating or boiling too hard can curdle them into lumps. Keep the heat moderate and stir while the mixture simmers.

“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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