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Egg Vermicelli

Egg Vermicelli is a dish of toast topped with a creamy sauce of butter, flour, milk, and chopped hard‑cooked eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Egg Vermicelli

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter, then add the flour, stirring until combined.

  2. Gradually add the hot milk, stirring until the sauce thickens.

  3. Season with salt and pepper.

  4. Cook the eggs hard, then chop the whites into small pieces and add them to the sauce.

Assemble and serve

  1. Moisten and butter the toast.

  2. Pour the sauce over the toast and rub the yolks through a strainer over the top.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Whites add body and substance to the sauce, while the yolks give a rich, crumbly topping.
Butter
Fat that carries flavour and enriches the sauce and the buttered toast.
Flour
Starch that thickens the butter and milk into a smooth, coating sauce.
Hot milk
Liquid that forms the body of the sauce; heating it helps it blend smoothly with the roux.

The step that matters

Add the hot milk gradually. Adding hot milk slowly to the butter and flour mixture while stirring keeps lumps from forming and lets the starch swell evenly, giving a smooth, thickened sauce.

“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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