Name: Deviled Eggs
Ingredients: 6 hard boiled eggs; 2 tablespoons butter; ¼ teaspoon salt; salad dressing

Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Deviled Eggs

Ingredients

6 hard boiled eggs
2 tablespoons butter
¼ teaspoon salt
salad dressing

Directions

Prepare the filling

Halve the hard boiled eggs and remove the yolks.
Press the yolks through a ricer or mash finely.
Add butter and salt to the yolks.
Mix in enough salad dressing to form a paste.

Assemble and serve

Refill the halved egg whites with the yolk mixture.
Serve cold.

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.

Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks: Provide the rich, creamy base that gives the filling its body.
Butter: Adds fat for a smoother, richer texture in the yolk filling.
Salad dressing: Adds moisture and tang, binding the yolks into a spreadable paste.

“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.