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Stuffed Egg Salad

A salad of boiled eggs filled with a butter, ham, and mustard yolk mixture, served on lettuce with mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,356 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Stuffed Egg Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Cook and prepare the eggs

  1. Cook the eggs for 30 minutes.

  2. Let them cool.

  3. Shell and cut in half with a sharp knife.

  4. Remove the yolks from the whites.

Make the filling

  1. Rub the yolks into a paste with melted butter, chopped ham or tongue, salt, pepper, and mustard.

  2. Form the yolk mixture into balls.

Stuff and serve

  1. Place one ball in each half of the egg white.

  2. Serve on a bed of lettuce leaves 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.

  1. Mustard + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Ham + mustardtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together747 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Butter + hamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide the whites that hold the filling and the yolks that form the creamy stuffing.
Melted butter
Adds fat and moisture so the yolks blend into a smooth, rich paste.
Ham or tongue
Adds savory flavor and meaty texture to the yolk filling.
Mustard
Adds sharp, tangy flavor that balances the richness of the yolks and butter.

The step that matters

Remove the yolks from the whites. Cooked yolks must be lifted out cleanly so the whites stay intact as cups. Tearing the whites can leave the halves unable to hold the filling.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, ham, pepper, mustard):

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Asparagusfits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, ham, pepper, mustard. 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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