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Egg on Toast

A slice of bread topped with a boiled egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Egg on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Brown the slice of bread nicely.

  2. Butter the toast.

Poach and serve

  1. Break the egg into boiling water and let it cook until the white hardens.

  2. Use a skimmer to lift the egg from the water and place it on the toast.

  3. Serve immediately.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  3. 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

Egg
Its proteins set when heated, forming the soft, cooked white and runny yolk on the toast.
Bread
Browning gives the toast a crisp, toasted flavour and a sturdy base for the egg.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and softening the toast's surface.

The step that matters

Letting the white set before lifting the egg. Egg white begins to set at around 60°C and firms as it heats. Lifting too early can tear the delicate white apart, so wait until it has firmed before using the skimmer.

“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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