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Dessert

Butterless Sauce

A custard-like sauce made with powdered sugar, eggs, milk, and flavoring, finished with folded egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Butterless Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Heat the milk in a double boiler until hot.

  2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with the powdered sugar until well combined.

  3. Add the egg mixture to the hot milk and cook gently, stirring, until it thickens like custard.

Flavor and finish

  1. Remove from heat and add your chosen flavoring once cool.

  2. Just before serving, gently fold in the well-beaten egg whites.

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. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Eggs
Yolks thicken the milk as they cook, and folded-in whites add lightness.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves smoothly into the beaten yolks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into a custard-like sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the custard gently while stirring. Egg proteins set as they heat, so high heat or stopping the stirring can scramble the yolks into lumps instead of a smooth, thickened sauce.

“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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