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Poached Eggs with Ham

Poached eggs served on buttered toast topped with grated ham.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Ham and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,526 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Poached Eggs with Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare a dish of very delicate buttered toast.

  2. Break the eggs into separate cups, being careful not to break the yolks.

  3. While the eggs are cooking, grate the ham.

Poach the eggs

  1. In a frying pan, bring half full of boiling salted water to a boil and add the vinegar.

  2. Gently slip the eggs into the boiling water without breaking them.

  3. Cook the eggs to your desired doneness.

Serve

  1. Once the eggs are done, use a skimmer to remove them and place each on a slice of toast.

  2. Top each egg with a tablespoon of grated ham and serve immediately.

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. Ham + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,526 recipes

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

  2. Ham + vinegartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-methylbutanol (malty, whiskey).

  3. Egg + vinegartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and vinegar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,922 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 firm, tender structure as the whites cook, forming the poached centre.
Vinegar
Helps the egg whites coagulate quickly and hold their shape in the water.
Cold boiled ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour and a meaty contrast to the soft eggs.
Buttered toast
Provides a crisp, buttery base that soaks up the yolk and adds richness.

The step that matters

Gently slip the eggs into the boiling water. Eggs cooked in water lose their shape if the whites spread or break apart. Vinegar in the water helps the whites set quickly, but the eggs must enter gently so the proteins coagulate into a compact shape.

“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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