Skip to main content
Bread

Broiled Eggs

Broiled eggs served on buttered toast with sour orange juice, coarse sea salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,402 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Broiled Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Make small slices of toast equal to the number of eggs.

  2. Butter the toast and place each egg, broken into a cup, on a slice.

Cook and serve

  1. Set the dish before the fire to cook the eggs to your desired doneness.

  2. Once cooked, squeeze sour orange juice over the eggs, season with coarse sea salt and cayenne pepper, and serve hot.

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. Orange + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  4. Butter + orangetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Egg + orangetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,696 recipes

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

Egg and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,696 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 a soft, cooked topping on the toast as the heat firms the proteins.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the toast and helps it brown lightly.
Slices of toast
Give the eggs a base to rest on and soak up the runny yolk.

The step that matters

Cooking the eggs before the fire. Egg proteins set with heat, so the eggs can go from runny to rubbery quickly. Watching them closely lets you stop at the doneness you want.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Orangethe original

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

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipesPotato BreadPotato Bread124 recipes