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Devilled Eggs

Hard‑boiled eggs filled with seasoned yolk and breadcrumbs, garnished with watercress or lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and watercress work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 983 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Devilled Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Cut the hard-boiled eggs in half and remove the yolks.

  2. In a bowl, season the yolks with salt and cayenne, then add bread crumbs to achieve a crumbly texture.

  3. Trim a small piece off the ends of the egg whites to help them stand upright.

Fill and serve

  1. Fill the egg whites with the seasoned yolk mixture, piling it high.

  2. Arrange the filled eggs on a dish and garnish with watercress or shredded lettuce.

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 + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Bread + watercresstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  5. Egg + watercresstop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled eggs
Provide the whites that hold the filling and the yolks that form the creamy base.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture from the yolks, giving the filling a crumbly, stiffer texture.
Cayenne pepper
Adds gentle heat that cuts through the richness of the yolk filling.

The step that matters

Trimming the egg white ends. A small flat cut lets each white sit upright on the dish, so the filling stays in place. Cutting too much can tear the white or expose it to the filling.

“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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