Name: Egg Sauce
Ingredients: 3 eggs; ½ cup melted butter; 2 egg whites (diced); 2 egg yolks (cut into ¼ inch pieces)

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

3 eggs
½ cup melted butter
2 egg whites (diced)
2 egg yolks (cut into ¼ inch pieces)

Directions

Cook the eggs

Place the eggs in boiling water and cook for 12 minutes until hard.
Transfer the eggs to cold water to cool.
Remove the shells.

Prepare and combine

Dice 2 egg whites.
Cut the yolks into ¼ inch pieces.
In a sauceboat, combine the diced whites and yolks.
Pour in the melted butter and stir gently to combine.

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 + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked 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

Egg yolks: Add richness and body, and blend with the butter to give the sauce its creamy texture.
Egg whites: Add diced texture and bulk to the sauce.
Melted butter: Adds fat and smoothness, giving the sauce a rich, creamy mouthfeel.

“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.