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Salad

Egg Ltllies

Egg Lilies are boiled eggs sliced into strips and served on lettuce petals with a yolk butter mixture and garnished with parsley and olives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,649 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Egg Ltllies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Place the eggs in cold water and boil for 10 minutes.

  2. Drop the eggs into cold water, then shell them.

  3. While still warm, cut the eggs into strips from the small end nearly to the base.

Assemble and serve

  1. Carefully lay back the petals on a heart of bleached lettuce.

  2. Remove the yolks and mash them with butter, vinegar, mustard, salt, and paprika.

  3. Form the yolk mixture into a cone-shaped ball and place it on the petals.

  4. Sprinkle tiny bits of parsley over the ball and add stuffed olives.

  5. Serve on cut glass dishes to enhance the presentation.

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 + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

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

  2. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mustard + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Mustard + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Vinegar + olivetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,297 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide the white petals and the yolk filling that forms the lily.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the mashed yolk mixture.
Vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity that brightens the rich yolk filling.
Mustard
Adds a sharp, pungent flavour that balances the richness of the yolks.

The step that matters

Boil the eggs for 10 minutes and cool them quickly. Boiling for the full time sets the yolks firmly so they can be mashed into a shapeable ball. Plunging the eggs into cold water stops further cooking and makes the shells easier to peel, which helps keep the white petals intact.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, vinegar, parsley, olive. 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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