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Sauce

Egg Sauce

Egg Sauce is a sauce made with boiled eggs, butter, and optional mustard, served with salt fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Boil the eggs for 10 minutes.

  2. Transfer the eggs to cold water and let them cool.

  3. Peel the eggs and chop them coarsely.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and add the chopped eggs.

  2. If desired, mix in the prepared mustard.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce with salt fish.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + mustardtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,003 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Egg + mustardtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,210 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide the body and richness of the sauce as the chopped pieces hold together.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and helps the chopped egg coat smoothly.

The step that matters

Boil the eggs for 10 minutes, then cool them promptly. Prolonged heat can cause a greyish-green ring to form around the yolk, from a reaction between sulfur in the white and iron in the yolk. Moving the eggs to cold water stops the cooking and makes them easier to peel and chop cleanly.

Flavor stand-ins for the mustard

The recipe marks mustard as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter):

  1. Asparagusbetter flavor fit
  2. Chivebetter flavor fit
  3. Leekbetter flavor fit
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, 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).

“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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