Name: Baked Eggs
Ingredients: 1 egg; 1 teaspoon butter; Salt and pepper to taste

Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Baked Eggs

Ingredients

1 egg
1 teaspoon butter
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
Butter a shallow earthen dish suitable for one egg.

Bake

Break the egg into the dish without breaking the yolk.
Sprinkle with salt and pepper.
Bake just long enough to set the white.

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.

Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together50,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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

Egg: Forms the whole dish; the white sets with heat while the yolk stays runny.
Butter: Adds richness and keeps the egg from sticking to the dish.

The step that matters

Bake just long enough to set the white. Egg white begins to set around 60°C (140°F) and turns firm as it heats, while the yolk thickens more slowly. Overbaking sets the yolk too, leaving it dry and chalky, so stop once the white is opaque and firm.

“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.