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Eggs, Steamed

Steamed eggs cooked in buttered dish, served with salt and optional fried ham or sausages.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter 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, Steamed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break 6 eggs into separate cups.

  2. Butter a dish well and carefully place each egg into it.

  3. Cover the dish to retain heat.

  4. Set the dish over a pan of boiling water.

  5. Dot the top of the eggs with small bits of butter.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for about 4 minutes until set.

  2. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and serve with fried ham or sausages.

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

Eggs
Set with steam to form the main structure of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and prevents the eggs from sticking to the dish.

The step that matters

Steam for about 4 minutes until set. Egg proteins coagulate with heat, so the whites firm while the yolks stay soft. Oversteaming turns the texture rubbery and dry, so check for set whites promptly.

“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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