Name: Deviled Eggs
Ingredients: 6 hard-boiled eggs; 6 tablespoons ground ham, tongue, or salt meat; mayonnaise dressing to serve

Why it works: Egg and ham are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,526 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Deviled Eggs

Ingredients

6 hard-boiled eggs
6 tablespoons ground ham, tongue, or salt meat
mayonnaise dressing to serve

Directions

Prepare the eggs

Remove the shells from the hard-boiled eggs and cut them in half.
Take out the yolks and set them aside.

Make the filling and serve

Grind the same quantity of ham, tongue, or salt meat as the yolks.
Mix the ground meat with the yolks and season to taste.
Refill the egg whites with the mixture and serve with mayonnaise dressing.

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.

Egg + hamtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,526 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs: The whites form the holder, and the yolks become the creamy base of the filling.
Ham, tongue, or salt meat: Adds savory, salty flavor to the mashed yolks.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and moisture, making the yolk filling smooth and rich.

“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.