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£gg and Ham Parties.

A party dish of fried bread filled with ham and brown sauce, topped with poached eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

£gg and Ham Parties.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Cut a slice of stale bread two inches thick from a quarter loaf.

  2. Use a round cutter to cut out four or five pieces.

  3. Press a smaller cutter into the larger pieces and remove the inner bread with a knife.

  4. Heat a large stew-pan of boiling lard and fry the bread shapes until light brown.

  5. Drain the fried bread on a clean cloth and set aside.

Make the ham filling

  1. Mince the lean ham and mix it with the brown sauce.

  2. Heat the mixture over the fire for a few minutes, then add Cayenne pepper and lemon juice.

Assemble and serve

  1. Fill the bread shapes with the ham mixture and top each with a poached egg.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Bread + hamtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

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

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

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

  5. Ham + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,526 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

Stale bread
Its dry crumb holds its shape and crisps when fried, forming a sturdy base.
Lean ham
Provides the savoury, meaty flavour that forms the body of the filling.
Brown sauce
Adds moisture and rich, savoury depth that binds the ham into a spoonable filling.
Eggs
Poached eggs set into a soft topping that adds richness and moisture to each piece.

The step that matters

Frying the bread shapes. Lard must be hot enough to crisp and brown the bread quickly; if it is too cool, the bread absorbs excess fat and turns greasy and soggy instead of light brown and sturdy.

“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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