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Fricasseed Eggs

A creamy egg dish with butter, milk, flour, salt, pepper, onion juice, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Fricasseed Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the milk, reserving a little to blend with the flour.

  3. When the milk boils, stir in the blended flour and continue stirring until thick and smooth.

  4. Add salt, pepper, and onion juice for seasoning.

Finish and serve

  1. Cut the hard-boiled eggs into quarters and add them to the mixture until heated through.

  2. Stir in the chopped parsley and serve over buttered toast.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Hard-boiled eggs
Provide the main body of the dish and are gently warmed in the sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour at the start of the cooking.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, stable sauce when stirred in.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the flour thickens.

The step that matters

Blending the flour before adding it to the milk. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps, because its starch grains coat together before they can hydrate. Mixing it first with a little cold milk keeps the grains separate, so the sauce thickens smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, butter, pepper, flour, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, butter, pepper, flour, parsley. 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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