Skip to main content
Main

Egg Vermicelli

A dish of toasted bread topped with a sauce of egg whites, butter, flour, and milk, garnished with yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Egg Vermicelli

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Soak the bread in 1 cup of hot water mixed with ¼ teaspoon salt.

  2. Remove the shells from the eggs, separate the whites from the yolks, and chop the whites finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan until foamy. Add the flour to the butter and gradually blend in the hot milk.

  2. Add the salt and pepper, then boil the sauce for 5 minutes.

Assemble and serve

  1. Stir in the chopped egg whites and pour the mixture over the toasted bread on a hot platter.

  2. Press the yolks through a small sieve and sprinkle over the top for garnish.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Chopped whites add body and substance to the sauce, while pressed yolks give a crumbly garnish.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a smooth, coating white sauce.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness and flavour to the sauce.
Hot milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding creaminess and mild sweetness.
Toasted bread
Acts as the base that soaks up the sauce and gives the dish its structure.

The step that matters

Blending the flour and hot milk into the butter. Adding the flour to melted butter and then gradually adding hot milk lets the starch disperse evenly. Adding it all at once can create lumps that are hard to smooth out later.

“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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes