Name: Batter for Timbale Cases or Fontage Cups
Ingredients: 2 egg yolks; ½ cup water; ¼ teaspoon salt; 1 tablespoon flour

Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Batter for Timbale Cases or Fontage Cups

Ingredients

2 egg yolks
½ cup water
¼ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon flour

Directions

Beat the yolks of two eggs well.
Add ½ cup of water and ¼ teaspoon of salt.
Stir in 1 tablespoon of flour until smooth.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together106,462 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 yolks: Add richness and help bind the batter into a smooth, cohesive mixture.
Flour: Thickens the batter and gives it body so it holds together when cooked.

“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.