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Egg Vermicelli

Egg Vermicelli is a sauce of milk, butter, flour, and egg served over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Egg Vermicelli

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk, butter, flour, and salt to make a sauce.

  2. Finely chop the white of the hard cooked egg and add it to the sauce, reheating gently.

Toast and serve

  1. Cut each slice of bread into rings using a cake cutter and toast until lightly browned.

  2. Arrange the toasted bread on a serving dish.

  3. Pour the sauce over the toasted bread.

  4. Pour the yolk of the egg through a strainer and cover the sauce with it.

  5. Garnish with toast points and parsley.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which the flour thickens into a smooth body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a sauce by swelling with heat and binding the liquid.
Egg
The chopped white adds texture to the sauce, and the strained yolk gives a fine, crumbly topping.
Bread
Provides the toasted base that holds the sauce and gives a crisp contrast in texture.

The step that matters

Reheating the sauce gently. Egg white proteins set and toughen when overheated, which can make the chopped white rubbery and cause the sauce to curdle or turn grainy. Keeping the heat low keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, egg, butter, bread, flour):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, butter, bread, flour. 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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