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Sauce

Sauce for Poached Eggs

A quick sauce made from ketchup, Worcestershire, Harvey, mushroom sauce, and cream, boiled for poached eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Sauce for Poached Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix all ingredients thoroughly.

  2. Heat the mixture to boiling point.

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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Tomato + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Ketchup + creamtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together279 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Tomato + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,469 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Tomato ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity that give the sauce its tangy base.
Worcestershire sauce
Adds savoury depth and a salty, fermented background flavour.
Mushroom sauce
Adds savoury, earthy flavour to the sauce.
Cream
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky texture.

The step that matters

Heating the mixture to boiling point. The sauce contains acidic ketchup and dairy cream. Prolonged or very high heat can make dairy curdle or separate, so heat gently and watch the sauce closely as it approaches boiling.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ketchup, sauce, mushroom, cream):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ketchup, sauce, mushroom, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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