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Breakfast

Egg Sandwiches

A sandwich made with a paste of boiled egg yolks, chopped whites, butter, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Egg Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Remove the yolks from the hard boiled eggs and finely powder them.

  2. Chop the egg whites as finely as possible.

  3. Mix the powdered yolks and chopped whites together.

Make and serve

  1. Add melted butter, salt, and cayenne pepper, then rub to a paste.

  2. Spread the mixture on bread.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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

Hard boiled eggs
Provide the main body of the filling, with yolks and whites both forming the paste.
Melted butter
Adds fat and moisture, helping the powdered egg bind into a smooth, spreadable paste.

The step that matters

Rubbing the yolks, whites and butter to a paste. Yolks must be powdered fine and the butter worked in evenly; coarse lumps of egg white or unblended butter leave the spread gritty and uneven rather than smooth.

“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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