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Egg Sauce

A creamy sauce made with eggs, butter, milk, flour, spices, and lemon, served with salt fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour smoothly.

  3. Add pepper, salt, cayenne, and milk gradually; stir until boiling.

  4. Boil for three minutes.

  5. Add lemon juice and chopped eggs.

  6. Stir in the cream and heat until very hot.

Serve

  1. Serve 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Melts to form the fat base that the flour is cooked into.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce when cooked with the butter.
Milk
Forms the liquid body of the sauce, which thickens as it comes to a boil.
Hard-boiled eggs
Chopped and stirred in at the end to add texture and body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the milk gradually. Adding liquid slowly while stirring keeps the flour dispersed, so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of forming lumps.

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

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

  1. Vanillaabout as good a flavor fit
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Coconutabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Figabout as good a flavor fit

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