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Fricasseed Eggs

A creamy egg dish with butter, flour, parsley, mushrooms, stock, and sliced hard-boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Fricasseed Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a chafing dish.

  2. Add the flour while stirring constantly.

  3. Stir in the parsley, mushrooms, and stock.

  4. Simmer for 5 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the sliced eggs and bring to a boil.

  2. Serve hot.

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 + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,132 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mushroom + vealtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and gives it a rich, rounded flavour.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and a little moisture to the sauce.
White stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, carrying the flavour of the dish.
Hard-boiled eggs
Provide the main body of the dish, with a firm, mild texture.

The step that matters

Add the flour while stirring constantly. Flour stirred into hot butter must be kept moving so it cooks evenly. Stopping lets lumps form, which then resist smoothing into the stock and leave a grainy, uneven sauce.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Capersfits about as well
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, mushroom, veal, 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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