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To Preserve Eggs

This recipe uses pickling lime, which should be handled with care.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mutton and cream work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 550 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Preserve Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Store eggs in a jar of salt or lime water with the small end downwards.

  2. Grease eggs well with melted mutton suet and place them in a bin of bran, small end downwards.

  3. Pour 1 gallon of boiling water over 2 quarts of pickling lime and ½ pound of salt.

  4. When the mixture is cold, stir in 1 ounce of cream of tartar.

  5. Place the eggs in the mixture, ensuring they are fully covered.

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. Mutton + creamtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together550 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Egg + muttontop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,648 recipes

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

  4. Lime + creamtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together740 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Lime + muttontop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together99 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, mutton, cream):

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, mutton, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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