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Egg on Toast

A toasted bread slice topped with a boiled egg, seasoned with salt and pepper, and buttered.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Egg on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Toast and poach

  1. Brown the slice of bread over the coals.

  2. While the bread is toasting, break the egg into boiling water with salt and let it cook until the white hardens.

Assemble and serve

  1. Butter the toast.

  2. Use a skimmer to lift the egg from the water.

  3. Place the egg on the toast, dust with pepper and additional butter, and serve hot.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg
Its white sets when heated, giving the dish its main body and structure.
Bread
Toasting browns the surface and gives a crisp base that holds the egg.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and moistens the toast so it tastes less dry.

The step that matters

Poaching the egg until the white hardens. Egg white proteins set with heat, so the white firms while the yolk stays soft if timed well. Leaving it too long makes the yolk firm and dry, and lifting it too early leaves the white runny and loose.

“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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