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Eggs, Fricasseed, White

Eggs cooked in a white fricassee sauce with butter, parsley, shallot, mushrooms, flour, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Eggs, Fricasseed, White

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Boil the eggs hard.

  2. Cut each boiled egg into six slices.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the parsley, shallot, and mushrooms with the butter.

  2. Add salt and pepper.

  3. Cook until done but not browned.

  4. Mix the flour with the cream to thicken the sauce.

  5. Add the egg slices to the sauce.

  6. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  7. Serve.

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 + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

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

  4. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide the main body of the dish, with sliced whites and yolks held in the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the flavour of the shallot, parsley and mushrooms.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a smooth sauce that coats the egg slices.
Cream
Supplies moisture and body, forming the white sauce with the flour.
Shallot
Adds a mild, aromatic onion flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Mix the flour with the cream before adding it. Flour clumps if it hits hot liquid directly. Whisking it smoothly into the cream first lets the starch disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens without lumps.

Swap the parsley

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, shallot, mushroom, pepper, flour, cream. 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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