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Sauce

Egg Sauce

A sauce made with milk, water, butter, flour, eggs, parsley, and minced hard boiled egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat equal parts of milk and water in a saucepan until boiling.

  2. In a bowl, mix butter and flour until combined.

  3. Stir the butter-flour mixture into the boiling liquid and cook for 3 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in the beaten eggs.

  5. Return to heat, add chopped parsley and minced hard boiled egg, and boil for 1 minute.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps smooth the flour into a base for the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce when cooked with the butter and milk.
Eggs
Add body and richness, setting slightly when stirred into the hot sauce.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the beaten eggs into the sauce. Eggs can scramble if added to very hot liquid. Removing the pan from heat before stirring them in lets them blend smoothly and thicken gently.

Flavor stand-ins for the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegbetter flavor fit
  2. Cinnamonbetter flavor fit
  3. Capersabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, egg. 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).

“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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