Name: Very Good Egg Sauce
Ingredients: 4 fresh eggs; ⅓ pint rich melted butter or white sauce; Coarse sea salt (to taste)

Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and 118,967 recipes mention both. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Very Good Egg Sauce

Ingredients

4 fresh eggs
⅓ pint rich melted butter or white sauce
Coarse sea salt (to taste)

Directions

Prepare the eggs

Boil the eggs for 15 minutes.
Place them in fresh water until completely cold.
Roll the eggs on a table to break the shells and remove them.
Separate the whites from the yolks.
Dice the yolks into quarter-inch pieces.
Mince 2 of the egg whites finely.

Make the sauce

Mix the minced egg whites with the melted butter or white sauce.
Serve the sauce hot.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs: Egg whites and yolks form the body of the sauce, giving it substance and a rich flavour.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and giving the sauce a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
White sauce: Forms the liquid base that the minced egg whites are stirred into, giving body 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.