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Sauce

Egg Sauce

A sauce made from flour, water, salt, and eggs, thickened and served with optional parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,675 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the flour with cold water until smooth.

  2. Stir the mixture into the boiling water and thicken over heat.

  3. Add salt.

Add the eggs and serve

  1. Break the eggs into a cup and gradually stir them into the boiling sauce until they curdle.

  2. Remove from heat and stir briefly before serving.

  3. Add minced parsley if desired.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + parsleytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,765 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Eggs
Set and thicken the sauce as their proteins curdle when stirred into the hot liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs to the boiling sauce. If the eggs are poured in too fast or the sauce is too hot, the proteins set in lumps rather than blending smoothly. Gradual stirring while adding them keeps the sauce smooth and evenly thickened.

Flavor stand-ins for the parsley

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

  1. Jalapenobetter flavor fit
  2. Capersbetter flavor fit
  3. Nutmegbetter flavor fit
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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