Skip to main content
Sauce

Walnut Cream Sauce

A creamy sauce made with milk, egg yolk, walnuts, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Walnut and meat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,035 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Walnut Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the milk over medium heat until warm.

  2. Whisk in the egg yolk until well combined.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in the broken walnut meats.

  4. Season with salt to taste.

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. Walnut + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,035 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Milk + walnuttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,236 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Milk + meattop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,703 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Egg + meattop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the other flavours.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps thicken and emulsify the sauce.
Walnut meats
Contribute nutty flavour and a slight crunch with body.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Pecansfits about as well
  2. Walnutthe original
  3. Cocoafits about as well
  4. Peanutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, meat. 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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes