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Eggs with Curry Sauce

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Mushroom and thyme are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,557 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Eggs with Curry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove the shells from the eggs and cut them in half lengthwise.

  2. Mash the yolks with butter, salt, curry powder, cream, and the raw yolks until smooth.

  3. Add the cooked rice and mix with a fork.

  4. Fill the egg cups with the curry mixture, rounding it up well.

  5. Smooth the surface with a knife dipped in butter and place the eggs on a buttered plate to keep warm.

  6. For the sauce, chop the onion and fry it in butter with thyme and mushrooms until the onion is brown.

  7. Add the curry powder and fry for 2 minutes longer.

  8. Stir in the Bechamel sauce, bring to a boil, and let it simmer for 10 minutes.

  9. Skim the butter off the surface, strain the sauce, and pour it over the eggs.

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 + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Thyme + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Rice + mushroomtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,515 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

Swap the thyme

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, rice, cream, mushroom, onion, sauce):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Celeryfits about as well
  4. Thymethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, rice, cream, mushroom, onion, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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