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Egg Sauce

A sauce made from veal or white broth, butter, flour, parsley, egg yolks, pepper, lemon juice, finished with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the veal or white broth in a saucepan.

  2. Blend the butter and flour in a separate bowl until smooth.

  3. Add the butter‑flour mixture to the boiling broth to thicken.

  4. Stir in minced parsley, chopped egg yolks, pepper, and lemon juice.

  5. Remove from heat.

  6. Stir in the additional ounce of butter.

Serve

  1. Serve in a tureen.

  2. Optionally stir in egg whites or press yolks through a sieve over the meat.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 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

Veal or white broth
Forms the liquid base that the sauce is built on and carries its flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and with the flour forms the roux that thickens the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth, coating sauce when cooked with butter.
Hard-boiled eggs
Egg yolks add body and richness, while the whites add texture as an optional garnish.

The step that matters

Add the butter‑flour mixture to the boiling broth. Adding the flour mixture to boiling liquid while whisking helps it disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly without lumps.

“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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