Skip to main content
Breakfast

Eggs with Asparagus Tips

A quick egg dish cooked with butter, asparagus tips, thick cream, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Eggs with Asparagus Tips

Ingredients

Directions

Make the asparagus base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the asparagus tips and thick cream, stirring well for five minutes.

  3. Transfer the mixture into a bag.

Cook the eggs

  1. Break the two eggs over the asparagus mixture.

  2. Close the bag and cook for two minutes.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Egg + asparagustop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + asparagustop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,026 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Asparagus + creamtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together838 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set with gentle heat to bind the mixture into a soft, cohesive dish.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour to the saucepan base.
Thick cream
Adds richness and moisture, making the mixture smoother and creamier.
Asparagus tips
Provide the main vegetable flavour and bulk in the dish.

The step that matters

Close the bag and cook for two minutes. Eggs set as their proteins coagulate with gentle heat. Cooking too long pushes them past that point, making them rubbery and dry, so the two minutes should be watched closely.

Swap the asparagus

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

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Asparagusthe original
  4. Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, cream. 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.

More eggs with asparagus recipes

Scrambled 10Baked 3 See all 10 →

You might also like

Rice GruelRice Gruel28 recipesPeptoned Milk GruelPeptoned Milk Gruel9 recipes