Skip to main content
Main

Spanish Eggs

A baked dish of eggs, rice, butter, and breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Spanish Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Pick over and wash the rice.

  2. Combine rice and salt in boiling water and cook until tender, about 30 minutes.

  3. Drain the rice in a colander.

Assemble and bake

  1. Spread the rice on a dish and make small hollows for the eggs.

  2. Place each egg in a hollow.

  3. Melt the butter and pour it over the bread crumbs.

  4. Cover the eggs with the crumbs and bake until the crumbs are brown.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Rice + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

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

  4. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the bed that holds the eggs and absorbs the cooking liquid as it sets.
Eggs
Set during baking to form the soft, cooked centre of the dish.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden topping through browning in the oven.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the crumbs brown evenly.

The step that matters

Cover the eggs with the crumbs and bake until the crumbs are brown. Eggs continue to cook from residual heat after leaving the oven, so removing them as soon as the crumbs brown helps keep the yolks from becoming chalky or overset.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes