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Egg Alb

Egg Alb is a dish of hard‑boiled eggs filled with a mixture of minced cold meat, yolks, salt, and cream, served with white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,787 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Egg Alb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Boil the eggs hard, then remove the shells.

  2. Cut the eggs across and preserve the whites as cups.

Make the filling

  1. Mince the yolks very fine and mix with the minced cold meat.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and mix in enough cream to form a thick paste.

  3. Fill the egg whites with the mixture.

  4. Cut a small piece off the round end of each egg white to make them stand.

Serve

  1. Serve with a good white sauce.

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. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Meat + saucetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,167 recipes
  3. Egg + meattop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,432 recipes

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

  4. Meat + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,248 recipes

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

  5. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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 form the edible cups, and the yolks are minced into the filling.
Cold meat
Provides the savoury bulk and body of the filling.
Cream
Adds moisture so the minced yolk and meat bind into a thick paste.

The step that matters

Cut a small piece off the round end of each egg white. Trimming a thin slice off the rounded end gives each white a flat base so it stands upright on the plate. Cutting too much can open a hole and let the filling escape.

“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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