Name: Egg Sauce for Fish
Ingredients: 4 hard-boiled eggs; 1 pint drawn butter; ¼ teaspoon pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; 1 tablespoon lemon juice

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 for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

Boil the eggs until hard, then place them in cold water.
Once cooled, remove the shells and separate the yolks from the whites.
Chop the egg whites.
Push the yolks through a wire sieve or tin colander.

Make the sauce

Combine all the eggs in a sauce dish and add the drawn butter, pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,227 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together44,316 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

Eggs: Egg yolks and whites form the body of the sauce, thickening it and giving it a rich texture.
Drawn butter: Provides fat that makes the sauce rich, smooth, and creamy.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and egg flavor.

“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.