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Creamed Eggs with Mushrooms

A dish of hard‑boiled eggs and mushrooms in a paprika and mace cream sauce served on buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Creamed Eggs with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the yolks from the hard-boiled eggs and cut the whites into small pieces.

  2. Chop the mushrooms into small pieces.

Make and serve

  1. Make a rich cream sauce and season it with paprika, coarse sea salt, and a little mace.

  2. Add the egg whites and mushrooms to the sauce, heating it to boiling point.

  3. Add the whole yolks and heat through before serving on hot buttered toast.

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. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Mushroom + macetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,529 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Egg + mushroomtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,987 recipes

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

  5. Mace + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Mace and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,405 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

Hard-boiled eggs
Provide the main body of the dish, with whites cut up and yolks kept whole for the finish.
Mushrooms
Add savoury bulk and a meaty texture to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and browns the toast it is spread on.

The step that matters

Heating the sauce with the whole yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated, but overheating can make them grainy or curdle the sauce. Heat gently just until the yolks are warmed through, and keep the sauce below a hard boil at that point.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, mushroom, butter. 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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