Name: Eggs A-LA-creme
Ingredients: 12 eggs; thinly sliced bread; stale bread, grated; pepper; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Egg and bread match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and 22,584 recipes mention both. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Boil the eggs until hard, then slice them.
Line the bottom and sides of a moderately deep dish with thin slices of bread.
Layer the sliced eggs in the dish, sprinkling each layer with grated stale bread, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Egg + breadtop 6% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together22,584 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Bread + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together20,964 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Egg + peppertop 22% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together48,824 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs: Provide the main body of the dish, setting firm when boiled and forming the layered filling.
Stale bread: Absorbs moisture and adds texture and structure between the egg layers.

“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.