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Eggs En Marinade

Poached eggs topped with a sauce of water, meat gravy, vinegar, pepper, salt, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Eggs En Marinade

Ingredients

Directions

Make the marinade

  1. In a stew-pan, mix water, meat gravy, vinegar, pepper, and salt.

  2. Gradually stir in the egg yolks until the mixture thickens, but do not let it boil.

Assemble and serve

  1. Prepare 6 poached eggs and place them on a plate.

  2. Pour the sauce over the poached eggs and garnish with parsley.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Vinegar + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,477 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Meat + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,777 recipes

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

  5. Meat + parsleytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,040 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they set gently with heat, giving it a smooth body.
Meat gravy
Provides savoury depth and flavour to the marinade.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sauce.
Poached eggs
Form the base of the dish, served whole under the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks. Egg yolks scramble if they get too hot, so the mixture must be stirred gently over low heat and kept from boiling. Boiling curdles the yolks and leaves the sauce grainy instead of smooth and thickened.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, vinegar, pepper, egg):

  1. Tarragonfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Dillfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, vinegar, pepper, egg. 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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