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Eggs, Savoury

A quick savory scrambled egg dish cooked in butter with salt, pepper, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Eggs, Savoury

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub the bottom of a stewpan with a clove of garlic.

  2. Melt the butter in the stewpan until very hot.

  3. Beat the eggs in a bowl and season with salt, pepper, and cayenne.

Cook and serve

  1. Stir the beaten eggs into the hot butter quickly until cooked, about 4 minutes.

  2. Serve immediately on a hot dish.

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 + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

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

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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

Eggs
Set into soft curds as they cook, forming the body of the dish.
Butter
Enriches the eggs and keeps them moist and silky as they cook.

The step that matters

Stir the beaten eggs into the hot butter quickly. Eggs proteins set from heat, so over-high heat or long cooking makes them tough and dry. Constant quick stirring keeps the curds small and tender, so the eggs should be removed from the heat while still slightly glossy.

“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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