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Olive Stuffed Eggs

Hard-boiled eggs filled with a seasoned olive and yolk mixture, served with a creamy sauce over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Olive Stuffed Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Cut the hard-boiled eggs in half and remove the yolks.

  2. Stone the olives and chop one-fourth of them very fine.

  3. Mix the chopped olives with the yolks, season with salt and pepper, and refill the egg whites with the mixture.

  4. Chill the stuffed eggs thoroughly and then cut them into slices.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a chafing dish, add the flour and pepper, then gradually stir in the milk.

  2. Stir constantly until the sauce boils.

Serve

  1. Arrange the slices of eggs on hot buttered toast, pour the cream sauce over, and serve.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Olive + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,263 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Olive + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,828 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 body of the dish, with the yolks mashed into the filling.
Olives
Add a salty, savoury flavour to the yolk filling.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce and toast.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it heats.

The step that matters

Stir constantly until the sauce boils. Flour needs to be stirred while the milk heats, otherwise it clumps and the sauce can scorch on the bottom. Stirring keeps the starch dispersed so the sauce thickens evenly once it reaches a boil.

“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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