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Eggs

A simple dish of eggs, milk, and sugar, served as soft-boiled eggs or raw eggs beaten with milk and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Soft-boil the eggs

  1. Prepare soft-boiled eggs by boiling them until the whites are set and the yolks are still runny.

Make the raw egg mixture

  1. For raw eggs, beat them in a bowl with milk and sugar until well combined.

  2. Serve the raw egg mixture as a nutritious dish, especially beneficial in dysentery.

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. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
Provide the main structure and, when set, the firm white and liquid yolk texture.
Milk
Adds moisture and a softer, smoother texture to the beaten eggs.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavour of the eggs and milk.

The step that matters

Stopping the boil for soft-boiled eggs. Egg white proteins set at a lower temperature than yolk proteins. Removing the eggs from the heat at the right moment keeps the whites set while the yolks stay runny. Boiling too long firms the yolks.

“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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