Name: Egg Sauce
Ingredients: 2 or 3 hard-boiled eggs; drawn butter; cream or rich milk (optional)

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Egg Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

2 or 3 hard-boiled eggs
drawn butter
cream or rich milk (optional)

Directions

Boil the eggs hard and cut them finely.
Stir the eggs into the drawn butter.
If the sauce is too thick, add a little cream or rich milk.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together42,166 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Hard-boiled eggs: Provide the main body and rich flavour of the sauce as finely cut pieces suspended in the butter.
Drawn butter: Adds richness and a smooth, fatty mouthfeel that carries the egg flavour.
Cream or rich milk: Thins the sauce if it becomes too thick, adding moisture and smoothness.

“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.