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Egg Sauce

A sauce made from butter, flour, milk, salt, pepper, and chopped hard-boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour, then add the milk.

  3. Stir carefully until boiling.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

Add the eggs

  1. Chop the hard-boiled eggs into small pieces and stir them into the sauce.

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. Butter + milktop 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. Flour + milktop 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
Adds fat and richness, and carries flavour through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells with heat, giving the sauce body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a smooth sauce.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add soft chopped pieces of texture and substance to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir carefully until boiling.. Flour mixed into hot milk can lump or scorch on the base of the pan. Constant stirring keeps the starch dispersed, and the sauce must reach boiling for the starch to swell fully and thicken.

“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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