Name: Egg Sauce
Ingredients: 2 hard-boiled egg yolks; 1 raw egg yolk; salt to taste; pepper to taste

Why it works: Egg and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Egg Sauce

Ingredients

2 hard-boiled egg yolks
1 raw egg yolk
salt to taste
pepper to taste

Directions

Make the sauce

Chop the hard-boiled egg yolks finely.
Mix the chopped yolks with the raw egg yolk.
Season with salt and pepper.

Serve

Serve with bluefish or white bass.

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.

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

Hard-boiled egg yolks: Provide a firm, crumbly body and rich, mellow egg flavor to the sauce.
Raw egg yolk: Adds richness and emulsifying power, helping the sauce bind into a smooth, creamy texture.

“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.