Name: Egg Sauce
Ingredients: 2 hard-boiled eggs; ¼ teaspoon mustard; juice of 1 lemon; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste; melted butter

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,047 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Chop the hard-boiled eggs into small pieces.
Mix the chopped eggs with pepper, coarse sea salt, and melted butter.
For a piquant sauce, add mustard and lemon juice.
Serve warm.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together15,430 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together3,816 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together41,227 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
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

Flavor stand-ins for the mustard

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

Asparagusbetter flavor fit
Capsicumbetter flavor fit
Spinachbetter flavor fit
Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, lemon, pepper, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).