Why it works: Lime and cream work together. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 740 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓
Preservation of Eggs
Ingredients
Directions
Make the lime water
Dissolve salt and lime in hot water.
Boil the mixture and skim off any impurities.
Allow the solution to cool.
Preserve the eggs
Pack eggs in a stone jar and cover them with the lime water.
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.
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Lime + creamtop 31% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together740 recipes
Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Lime
- Makes the water strongly alkaline, which slowly sets the egg white and cures the yolk.
- Coarse sea salt
- Seasons the eggs and helps preserve them in the alkaline solution.
The step that matters
Allow the solution to cool. Packing eggs into hot lime water would partly cook them and can crack the shells, so the solution must be cool before the eggs go in.
“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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