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Egg Sauce, or White Sauce

A creamy sauce made with flour, butter, milk, salt, white pepper, and 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, or White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour with the warm butter.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, heat the sweet milk with salt and white pepper until boiling.

  2. Add the butter and flour mixture to the boiling milk, stirring briskly until thickened and creamy.

  3. Chop the hard-boiled eggs and add them to the sauce, heating through.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce in a boat.

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. Flour + buttertop 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).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a smooth, creamy sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth mouthfeel and flavor.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour and butter thicken into sauce.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and substance, with chopped egg giving the sauce texture.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture to the boiling milk. Stirring briskly as the mixture goes in keeps flour from clumping into lumps, so the sauce thickens smoothly.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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