Name: Egg Sauce
Ingredients: ½ cup melted butter; 3 hard-boiled eggs, finely chopped; coarse sea salt to taste; pepper to taste

Why it works: Butter and egg 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

½ cup melted butter
3 hard-boiled eggs, finely chopped
coarse sea salt to taste
pepper to taste

Directions

Make the sauce

Melt the butter in a saucepan.
If using with fish, incorporate the fish water into the sauce.

Finish and serve

Add the finely chopped hard-boiled eggs just before serving.
Serve the sauce with fresh or salt cod, or boiled fowl.

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.

Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together50,580 recipes

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

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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

Butter: Melted butter forms the rich, fluid base that carries the sauce and coats the food it is served with.
Hard-boiled eggs: Chopped egg adds body, texture and a mild savoury richness to the melted butter.

“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.