Why it works: Egg and lime 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 ↓
Preservation of Eggs
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the lime-water
Prepare lime-water by mixing 5 to 6 pounds of slaked quick-lime with 20 to 30 pints of water in a covered vessel.
Allow the mixture to stand until it clears.
Preserve the eggs
Once clear, take fresh eggs and place them in a bottle.
Fill the bottle with the prepared lime-water.
Sprinkle a little powdered lime on top and seal the bottle.
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.
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Egg + limetop 34% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Fresh eggs
- The food being preserved; the lime-water slowly penetrates the shell to set the contents.
- Slaked quick-lime
- Makes the strongly alkaline solution that preserves the eggs and firms the egg white.
The step that matters
Letting the lime-water clear before adding eggs. Undissolved lime particles can cloud the solution and sit on the shell; waiting for the water to clear means the liquid is a settled, consistent alkaline solution that preserves the eggs evenly.
“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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