Name: Egg Sauce
Ingredients: 3 hard-boiled eggs; ½ cup butter

Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Egg Sauce

Ingredients

3 hard-boiled eggs
½ cup butter

Directions

Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat.
Chop the hard-boiled eggs finely and add them to the melted butter.
Stir well and serve warm as a sauce for fish.

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 + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled eggs: Chopped finely, they give the sauce body and a soft, rich texture.
Butter: Melts to form the fat base that carries the eggs and gives the sauce its richness.

“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.