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Egg Sauce

A sauce made with hard‑boiled egg, flour, butter, milk, salt, and pepper.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Hard boil the egg for 10 minutes.

  2. In a bowl, mix the flour and butter together.

  3. Add the milk and mix well until combined.

  4. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  5. Stir in the salt and black pepper.

Finish with the egg

  1. Shell the hard-boiled egg.

  2. Chop the egg fairly finely.

  3. Add the chopped egg to the sauce.

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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 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

Egg
Adds richness, body and a mild savory flavor to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated with the liquid.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth texture and rich flavor, and coats the flour.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that becomes the creamy body of the sauce.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated in liquid until it swells. Mixing the flour and butter before adding the milk helps prevent lumps, and the sauce should be fully hot to reach full thickness.

“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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