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Poached Eggs

Poached eggs served with a sauce of sautéed onion, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, garlic, butter, stock, wine or cider, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Poached Eggs

serves 6

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a skillet, fry the onion with parsley, thyme, bay leaf, and garlic in butter until softened.

  2. Add stock and red wine or cider; cook gently until well blended.

Poach and serve

  1. In a separate pot, poach the eggs in a mixture of vinegar and water.

  2. Drain the poached eggs and place them on pieces of toast that have been briefly soaked in hot water.

  3. Strain the sauce, season with salt and pepper, and pour it around the eggs.

  4. Garnish with fresh parsley before serving.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Parsley + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Thyme + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,608 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide the main structure and body of the dish as they set in the poaching liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the aromatics as they soften in the skillet.
Red wine or cider
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the sauce as it reduces gently.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and adds savoury flavour.
Onion
Adds sweetness and savoury depth as it softens in butter.

The step that matters

Poach the eggs in vinegar and water. Vinegar lowers the pH of the poaching water, which helps the egg whites coagulate quickly and hold a neat shape around the yolk.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, parsley, thyme, garlic, butter, red wine, egg):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Rosemaryfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, parsley, thyme, garlic, butter, red wine, egg. 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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