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Beauregard Eggs

A creamy egg sauce served over toast with sliced hard‑boiled egg whites and sprinkled yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Beauregard Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the eggs until hard, then remove the shells.

  2. Cut the egg whites into round slices.

  3. Pass the egg yolks through a potato ricer.

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, rub the butter with the flour until smooth.

  2. Gradually add the milk, mixing until thoroughly blended.

  3. Season with salt and pepper.

  4. Add the egg whites to the mixture and heat until hot.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over the slices of toast and sprinkle the powdered yolks on top.

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 + flourtop 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).

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

Eggs
Whites are sliced into the sauce and yolks, pushed through a ricer, make a fine powdered topping.
Butter
Melts with the flour to form a base that gives the sauce richness and body.
All-purpose flour
Mixed with the butter, its starch thickens the milk into a smooth, creamy sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid of the sauce, which thickens as the starch cooks and sets it creamy.

The step that matters

Blending the flour and butter smooth before adding milk. Rubbing the butter and flour together until smooth lets the flour disperse evenly, so the milk thickens into a lump-free sauce rather than clumps.

“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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