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Dropped Eggs

A simple boiled egg dish seasoned with salt, pepper, and butter, served on toast or ham.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and ham are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,475 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Dropped Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the eggs

  1. Break the eggs one by one into a saucer.

  2. Slip the eggs into boiling water for about three minutes.

  3. If cooking more eggs, use a skimmer to lift them out instead of pouring off the water.

Season and serve

  1. Carefully remove the eggs and season with salt, pepper, and small bits of butter.

  2. Serve on slices of toast or pieces of broiled ham.

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 + hamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Egg + hamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,526 recipes

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

  3. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Pepper + hamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,058 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set their whites while the yolks stay soft and runny when boiled briefly.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the warm eggs.

The step that matters

Slip the eggs into boiling water for about three minutes. Timing controls the yolk. Too short leaves the white runny, and too long sets the yolk through. Eggs broken into a saucer first can be lowered gently so the whites hold together.

“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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