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Buttered Eggs

A simple dish of eggs cooked with butter, pepper, and salt, 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: Butter and egg 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 ↓

Buttered Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Warm the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add pepper and salt or other seasoning.

  3. Break in the eggs and stir quickly with a fork over the heat.

  4. Remove from heat as soon as they begin to set.

  5. Continue stirring for 1 minute.

  6. Serve on buttered toast.

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. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Pepper + eggtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Pepper and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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

Eggs
Proteins set with heat, giving the soft, creamy structure of scrambled eggs.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth texture, and keeps the eggs from sticking.

The step that matters

Remove from heat as soon as they begin to set. Eggs keep cooking from their own residual heat after leaving the pan. Taking them off while still slightly soft prevents them from becoming dry, firm and rubbery.

“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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