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Creamed Eggs on Toast

Creamed Eggs on Toast is a dish of toasted bread topped with creamy mixture of eggs, cream, milk, butter, flour, and salt, garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Creamed Eggs on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream sauce

  1. In a double boiler, combine cream and milk.

  2. Add butter and flour, stirring until thick.

  3. Mix in salt.

  4. Separate the egg whites and yolks; chop the whites coarsely.

  5. Add chopped whites to the hot cream mixture.

Assemble and serve

  1. Prepare browned slices of toast on a warmed platter.

  2. Cover the toast with the creamed egg whites.

  3. Grate the yolks over the top and garnish with parsley.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Cream
Forms the base of the sauce and gives it a rich, smooth body.
Milk
Thins the cream base and helps form a pourable sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cream mixture as it heats, giving the sauce body.
Hard-boiled eggs
Provide the main filling, adding texture and mild richness.

The step that matters

Thickening the cream sauce. Flour must be stirred into the butter and hot cream until smooth and thick. Stirring keeps it from clumping, and heating it fully lets the starch swell and thicken the sauce.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, milk, butter, flour. 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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