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Egg-shell Easter Eggs

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lime and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,289 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Egg-shell Easter Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Carefully open one end of each egg, making a hole the size of a small button.

  2. Shake out the yolks and whites, then wash each egg in lime water and set them hole-side down to dry.

  3. Place the eggs near a warm area to dry completely.

  4. Melt pure sugar cream in a pot and flavor it with lemon.

  5. Use a paper funnel to fill each egg half full with the lemon cream, turning the egg in a rotary motion until it sets.

  6. Once all eggs are filled, use a pencil to enlarge the hole slightly.

  7. Heat more cream, color it yellow to match a hard-boiled egg yolk, and fill each egg completely using the funnel.

  8. Let the filled eggs set for several hours.

  9. Clean each egg, seal the hole with a bit of red sealing wax, and cut a few in half for display.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, cream, lemon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, cream, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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