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Asparagus with Egg Sauce

A dish of boiled asparagus topped with a creamy egg yolk sauce seasoned with butter, flour, cream, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Asparagus with Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the asparagus

  1. Cut the tender parts of the asparagus into pieces.

  2. Boil in salted water until tender, about 30 minutes, then drain.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the flour, and cook for 1 minute.

  2. Stir in the cream and salt, and let it boil until thickened.

  3. Beat the egg yolks with the milk, then stir into the sauce without boiling again.

  4. Add the asparagus and a little nutmeg, then serve.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Asparagus + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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

Asparagus
Forms the main body of the dish and provides its fresh, green vegetable flavor.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the sauce base.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth sauce base.
Cream
Supplies the liquid and richness that form the body of the sauce.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and give it a smooth, rich texture when heated gently.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg yolks into the sauce without boiling. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat. If the sauce boils after the yolks are added, they can scramble and curdle, leaving the sauce grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the asparagus

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

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Arrowrootfits about as well
  4. Asparagusthe original

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