Name: Poached Eggs with Ham and Vegetables
Ingredients: 1 slice of bread from a round loaf; boiling lard for frying; slices of ham, stewed until tender in Madeira wine; 2 poached eggs; asparagus, peas, or truffle sauce for garnish

Why it works: Ham and asparagus match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and 100 recipes mention both. Both carry 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)

1 slice of bread from a round loaf
boiling lard for frying
slices of ham, stewed until tender in Madeira wine
2 poached eggs
asparagus, peas, or truffle sauce for garnish

Directions

Fry the slice of bread in boiling lard until golden, then drain and place it in a dish.
Top the bread with the stewed ham slices.
Poach the eggs and place them on top of the ham.
Garnish around the bread with asparagus, peas, or truffle sauce.

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.

Ham + asparagustop 9% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together100 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-octenal (fatty, green).
Bread + hamtop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together2,536 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).
Bread + eggtop 6% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together22,584 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Bread + asparagustop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together363 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Egg + asparagustop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together1,290 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: Poached eggs provide the rich, set centrepiece that sits on top of the ham.
Ham: Stewed slices add savoury, tender meat that forms the middle layer of the dish.
Bread: Fried slice gives a crisp, golden base that holds the other components.

Flavor stand-ins for the asparagus

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, ham, madeira wine, egg):

Shallotabout as good a flavor fit
Asparagusthe original
Capsicumabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, ham, madeira wine, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.