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Preserve

Preserving Eggs

A method for preserving eggs in a lime and salt solution.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lime and cream work together. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 740 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Preserving Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the lime-water

  1. Mix 2 gallons of water, 12 lb of unslacked lime, and 4 lb of coarse sea salt in a large container.

  2. Stir several times daily and let the mixture stand until clear.

  3. Carefully draw off the clear liquid, leaving the sediment.

Make the preserving liquid

  1. In a separate bowl, pulverize and mix 5 oz each of baking soda, cream of tartar, saltpetre, and borax, along with 1 oz of alum.

  2. Dissolve this mixture in 1 gallon of boiling water and add it to the clear lime-water.

Preserve the eggs

  1. Place the eggs in a container, ensuring they do not crack, and keep the liquid an inch above the eggs.

  2. Use a smaller lid or weight to keep the eggs submerged.

  3. This amount of liquid will preserve 1 dozen eggs.

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. Lime + creamtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together740 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Unslacked lime
Reacts with water to form the alkaline lime-water that cures the eggs.
Baking soda
Adds alkalinity to the preserving liquid, helping the curing solution stay strongly basic.
Saltpetre
Contributes salts that support the curing liquid's preserving action.
Coarse sea salt
Adds salinity to the lime-water, aiding preservation and flavor.

The step that matters

Keeping the eggs submerged and uncracked. Eggs floating above the liquid or with cracked shells can spoil, because the shell is the barrier that the alkaline liquid must pass through evenly. Keeping the liquid an inch above the eggs and weighting them down ensures the whole surface cures uniformly.

“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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