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Poached Eggs with Sorrel, or Endive

Poached eggs served on toasted bread with a sauce of sorrel, butter, cayenne, ham essence, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 231 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Poached Eggs with Sorrel, or Endive

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast

  1. Cut a slice of bread to cover the inside of a dish.

  2. Fry the bread in lard until light brown. Drain and keep warm.

  3. Butter the toast.

Make the sorrel sauce

  1. In a stewpan, combine chopped sorrel, butter, cayenne pepper, and essence of ham.

  2. Simmer until done.

  3. Thicken the sauce with flour and a little water.

  4. Boil for five minutes.

Poach and serve

  1. Poach the eggs.

  2. Drain the eggs.

  3. Place the poached eggs on the toast.

  4. Pour the sorrel sauce around.

  5. Serve hot.

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. Sorrel + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Bread + hamtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Sorrel + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together419 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Form the main body of the dish, setting when poached to hold their shape.
Sorrel
Provides the tart, acidic flavour that defines the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by swelling with liquid as it heats.
Bread
Forms a crisp, browned base that holds the eggs and sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with flour and a little water. Flour must be mixed smoothly with water and then boiled so its starch fully swells; otherwise the sauce stays floury or lumpy.

Swap the sorrel

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, pepper, ham, flour, egg):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Sorrelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, pepper, ham, flour, 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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