Skip to main content
Main

Eggs and White Sauce

Eggs filled with a yolk and cream mixture, steamed and served with white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Eggs and White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Cut the hard-boiled eggs in half and remove the yolks.

  2. Mix the yolks with cream and butter to form a paste.

  3. Add minced onion, parsley, salt, and cayenne to the mixture.

  4. Fill the egg whites with the yolk mixture.

Heat and serve

  1. Steam the filled egg whites until hot.

  2. Trim the pointed tips of the egg whites to help them stand on the dish.

  3. Serve with white sauce.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 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

Hard-boiled eggs
Provide the firm white shells that hold the filling and the yolks for the paste.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the yolks blend into a smooth, spreadable paste.
Cream
Loosens the yolk mixture, adding moisture so it forms a soft, smooth paste.

The step that matters

Steam the filled egg whites until hot. Steam heats the filling gently. Overheating can make the yolk paste dry, grainy, or rubbery, so heat only until the filling is hot throughout.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, cream, butter, parsley, pepper):

  1. Potatobetter flavor fit
  2. Spinachbetter flavor fit
  3. Chivebetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, butter, parsley, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes