Name: Poached Eggs with Mushrooms
Ingredients: 1 can mushrooms; ½ teaspoon salt; dash of cayenne pepper; few drops lemon juice; flour (for thickening); 10 poached eggs; toast

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Poached Eggs with Mushrooms

10 poached eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mushroom sauce

In a saucepan, combine the mushrooms, salt, cayenne pepper, and lemon juice.
Boil for 10 minutes, then remove the mushrooms.
Thicken the sauce with a little flour.

Plate and serve

Pour the sauce onto a platter.
Arrange the poached eggs around the outside and place the mushrooms in the center.
Serve hot with 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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,633 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together106,462 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together30,404 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Mushrooms: Provide the main savoury body and flavour of the sauce.
Eggs: Serve as the main protein, cooked separately and arranged around the mushrooms.
Flour: Thickens the sauce as it is cooked, giving it body.

“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.