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Egg Sauce

A sauce made from a hard‑boiled egg, butter, flour, and milk or water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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

Prepare the egg

  1. Boil the egg for 10 minutes.

  2. Place the egg in cold water for 1 minute.

  3. Remove the shell.

  4. Chop the egg finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan until it makes a spluttering sound.

  2. Add the flour.

  3. Stir well without browning.

  4. Pour in the cold water or milk.

  5. Add the salt.

  6. Simmer slowly for 10 minutes.

  7. Stir in the chopped egg.

  8. Serve.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 with the flour to form a roux that thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce.
Flour
Combined with melted butter, it thickens the cold water or milk as the sauce simmers.
Hard-boiled egg
Chopped and stirred in at the end, it adds body and texture to the sauce.
Cold water or milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir well without browning. Cooking the flour in butter without browning gives a pale roux with a raw-flour taste removed but little colour. Browning changes the flavour and colour, and the thickening power of the roux is reduced.

“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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