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Eggs a LA Matelotte

Poached eggs on bread croutons topped with a sauce of onion, shallot, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, mushrooms, and lemon, garnished with anchovies and fried parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and bread match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and 22,584 recipes mention both. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk, wheat, fish (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Poach the eggs in white stock, then drain and trim them.

  2. Place the eggs on fried bread croutons.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stew-pan, fry the onion and shallots in butter until soft.

  2. Add parsley, bay leaf, and thyme, then strain off the butter.

  3. Stir in the brown sauce, sliced mushrooms, and lemon juice.

Finish and serve

  1. Place the dish with the eggs in the oven for a few seconds.

  2. Sauce the eggs, garnish with anchovies and fried parsley, and serve.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Egg + breadtop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together22,584 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Bread + buttertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,145 recipes

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

  4. Shallot + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,718 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Shallot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together1,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Form the main body of the dish, set firm when poached and held on the croutons.
Shallots
Add a mild, sweet aromatic base when softened gently in butter.
Onion
Softens in butter to build a sweet, savoury base for the sauce.
Butter
Carries the aromatics and adds richness and a rounded flavour.
Brown sauce
Provides the body, depth and colour of the finished sauce.
White stock
Poaches the eggs, lending a light savoury flavour to them.

The step that matters

Poaching the eggs. Eggs poached in simmering stock hold their shape when the white sets quickly around the yolk. Too vigorous a boil scatters the white, so trimming and draining neatly afterwards matters.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, bread, shallot, butter, parsley, thyme, sauce):

  1. Chivebetter flavor fit
  2. Leekbetter flavor fit
  3. Potatobetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, bread, shallot, butter, parsley, thyme, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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