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Eggs with Cheese

A cheese omelette made with grated dry white cheese, butter, parsley, spring onions, nutmeg, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,062 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Eggs with Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Melt the cheese gently in a stew-pan with the butter.

  2. Mix in the chopped parsley, spring onions, and grated nutmeg.

Cook and serve

  1. Add the beaten eggs and stir until the mixture is set.

  2. Serve with fried or toasted bread around the edge.

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. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set with gentle heat to form the body of the omelette, giving it structure.
Dry white cheese
Melts into the mixture, adding richness and a savoury, salty flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour, and keeps the melted cheese smooth and glossy.

The step that matters

Stir the eggs until just set. Egg proteins set with gentle heat. Too much heat makes them tight, dry and rubbery, so keep the heat moderate and stop stirring once the mixture is just firm.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, butter, parsley, nutmeg, egg):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, butter, parsley, nutmeg, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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