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Breakfast

Eggs a LA Golden Rod

A toast topped with a creamy egg white sauce, seasoned with salt and pepper, and finished with parsley and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Eggs a LA Golden Rod

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Make a roux by melting the butter and mixing in the flour.

  2. Gradually add the milk, stirring until thickened.

  3. Stir in the chopped egg whites, and season with salt and pepper.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over toast.

  2. Sprinkle with chopped parsley.

  3. Press the yolks through a sieve and sprinkle over the top.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Melted with the flour to form a roux, enriching the sauce's flavour and smoothness.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a sauce when cooked with the melted butter.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into a creamy sauce with the roux.
Hard boiled eggs
Whites are chopped into the sauce for body, and yolks are sieved as a topping.

The step that matters

Gradually add the milk, stirring until thickened. Adding milk all at once can leave lumps of flour that do not smooth out. Adding it slowly while stirring lets the starch in the roux disperse evenly and thicken the sauce smoothly.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Cardamomfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, egg, 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.

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