Skip to main content
Sauce

Egg Sauce

A sauce made with butter, flour, haddock water, milk, hard‑boiled eggs, and lemon juice, served over fish pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and mix well.

  3. Gradually stir in the water from the boiled haddock and the milk.

  4. Cook for 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

  5. Add the diced hard-boiled eggs and a few drops of lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce around the fish pudding.

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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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 with the flour to form the base of the roux that thickens the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce when cooked with the butter and liquid.
Milk
Adds liquid and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, creamy body.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and a soft, rich texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually stir in the liquid. Adding the liquid slowly while stirring keeps the flour and butter mixture smooth. Adding it all at once can trap lumps of flour that are hard to remove later.

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

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

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

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

More egg sauce recipes

for Boiled Fish 7for Fish 7for Salt Cod 7Anchovy 5for Puddings 5for Boiled Codfish 3 See all 247 →

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes