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Poached Eggs, Burgundy Style

Poached eggs served on buttered toast with a Burgundy mushroom sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Poached Eggs, Burgundy Style

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Peel the onions and fry them lightly with butter in a small omelet pan.

  2. Add the chopped mushrooms and dust with flour.

  3. Pour in the white wine and stock, then let it simmer for 15 minutes.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, lemon juice, and chutney.

Assemble and serve

  1. Prepare rounds of hot buttered toast.

  2. Poach the eggs and place one on each toast.

  3. Thicken the sauce with an egg yolk and pour it over the eggs.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + white winetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,765 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

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

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

  4. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Poached whole for setting, and the yolk thickens the sauce for richness.
Flour
Dusted over the mushrooms, it thickens the sauce as it simmers.
Butter
Fat that gently fries the onions and adds savoury, rich flavour.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma, and its flavour deepens as the sauce simmers.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries its savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with the egg yolk. Egg yolk proteins set when heated, so they can curdle or turn grainy if the sauce is too hot. Keep the sauce warm rather than boiling when the yolk goes in, and stir steadily so it thickens smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, mushroom, flour, white wine, pepper, lemon, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, mushroom, flour, white wine, pepper, lemon, 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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