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Poached Eggs

Poached eggs are cooked by gently simmering in salted water and served on buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Poached Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Poach

  1. Fill a pan halfway with salted boiling water.

  2. Break each egg into a saucer and slide it into the water.

  3. Place the pan over moderate heat.

  4. Gently spoon some water over the eggs until a film forms over the yolks and the whites are firm.

Serve

  1. Carefully remove the eggs with a skimmer, trim the edges, and place them on hot buttered toast.

  2. Serve immediately.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whites set around the yolk during poaching, forming the main body of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the hot toast, softening the flavour of the dish.
Toast
Provides a crisp, absorbent base that holds the poached eggs.

The step that matters

Spooning water over the eggs. Gently spooning hot water over the tops sets a thin film over the yolks while the whites firm. Adding it too vigorously can break the whites apart, and cooking too long hardens the yolks.

“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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