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Cream Eggs on Toast

A simple dish of toasted bread topped with sweet cream and quickly cooked eggs, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Bread and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cream Eggs on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast and cream

  1. Toast the stale bread slices.

  2. Heat the sweet cream slightly and spoon it over the toasted bread.

Cook and serve

  1. In a pan, add some cream.

  2. Pour the eggs into the pan.

  3. Cook the eggs quickly, seasoning with salt and pepper.

  4. Spoon the cooked eggs over each piece of bread and serve immediately.

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. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  3. Cream + peppertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Cream + eggtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Bread + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,789 recipes

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

Cream and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 21,449 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

Stale light bread
Forms the base that holds the cream and eggs once toasted.
Sweet cream
Adds moisture and richness to the toast and to the eggs cooked in the pan.
Eggs
Set when cooked to form a soft, tender topping over the bread.

The step that matters

Cook the eggs quickly. Eggs proteins set at moderate heat and turn tough and dry if overcooked, so they should be cooked briefly and served right away while still soft and moist.

“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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