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Sauce

Foam Sauce

A light sauce made from egg yolk, flour, sugar, boiling water, and egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Foam Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine the beaten yolk of 1 egg with 1 teaspoon of flour and 2 tablespoons of sugar in a bowl.

  2. Set the bowl in hot water and gradually stir in 1 cup of boiling water.

  3. Cook the mixture for 5 to 10 minutes.

  4. Beat in the well-beaten white of 1 egg until combined.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Egg yolk
Enriches the sauce and helps it thicken as it cooks.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks, giving it body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the flavor of the sauce.
Egg white
Beaten in at the end to lighten the sauce and create a foam.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture for 5 to 10 minutes. The yolk and flour must cook long enough to thicken the sauce and remove the raw flour taste. Undercooked egg yolk stays thin and can taste starchy.

“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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