Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓
Egg Sauce
Ingredients
Directions
Beat the raw egg into the hot drawn butter.
Alternatively, pour hot drawn butter over the finely chopped hard-boiled eggs.
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.
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Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together118,967 recipes
Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Raw egg
- Beaten into the hot butter, it thickens and gives the sauce a smooth, rich body.
- Hard-boiled eggs
- Finely chopped, they add body and egg flavour to the butter in the alternative method.
- Drawn butter
- Hot melted butter carries the richness and flavour and helps set the sauce's texture.
The step that matters
Beat the raw egg into the hot butter. The butter must be hot enough to cook the raw egg slightly and thicken it, but if it is too hot the egg can scramble into lumps. Adding the hot butter slowly while beating keeps the sauce smooth.
“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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