Skip to main content
Main

Egg Sauce

A sauce made from mashed egg yolks, mustard, pepper, salt, vinegar, oil, and optional ketchup, served over boiled fish or with drawn butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mustard and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,067 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mash the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs in a bowl.

  2. Add mustard, pepper, coarse sea salt, vinegar, and salad oil; mix well.

  3. For extra flavor, stir in ketchup if desired.

Serve

  1. Serve over boiled fish or prepare drawn butter and add sliced or 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. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Mustard + ketchuptop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together331 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled egg yolks
Mashed yolks form the thick, creamy base of the sauce.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavor that balances the richness of the yolks and oil.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that cuts through the fat and brightens the sauce.
Salad oil
Supplies fat that emulsifies with the yolks to give a smooth, rich texture.

The step that matters

Add the oil and mix well. Oil must be incorporated gradually and thoroughly into the mashed yolks so the sauce emulsifies smoothly rather than separating into greasy droplets.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, pepper, vinegar, ketchup, butter):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardthe original
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Horseradishfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, vinegar, ketchup, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

More egg sauce recipes

for Boiled Fish 7for Fish 7for Salt Cod 7Anchovy 5for Puddings 5for Boiled Codfish 3 See all 247 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes