Name: To Preserve Eggs
Ingredients: 1 pound lime; 1 pint coarse sea salt (formerly 'Liverpool salt'); 1 patent pailful of spring water; eggs

Why it works: Lime and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,658 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

To Preserve Eggs

Ingredients

1 pound lime
1 pint coarse sea salt (formerly 'Liverpool salt')
1 patent pailful of spring water
eggs

Directions

Prepare the solution

Pour the spring water into a stone jar.
Add the lime and coarse sea salt, then let it stand for three days, stirring daily.
After three days, pour off the liquid.

Preserve the eggs

Submerge your eggs in the prepared solution.

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.

Lime + eggtop 34% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,658 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

Lime: Raises the alkalinity of the solution, which slowly transforms the egg's interior and firms its proteins.
Coarse sea salt: Helps draw moisture out and preserves the eggs while the alkaline solution works on them.
Eggs: The main ingredient, whose white and yolk change texture and flavour as they cure.

“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.