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Devilled Eggs

Hard‑boiled eggs filled with a seasoned yolk mixture and garnished with cress or parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Devilled Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Boil the eggs for 20 minutes.

  2. Remove the shells and cut each egg in half without breaking the whites.

Fill and serve

  1. Take out the yolks and pound them in a mortar, adding cayenne, salt, and curry powder.

  2. Stuff the whites with the yolk mixture and rejoin the eggs.

  3. Trim the broad ends slightly so they can stand upright.

  4. Arrange the eggs on a dish in a bed of cress or parsley.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Egg + parsleytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,765 recipes

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

  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

Eggs
Whites set firm to hold the filling, while the yolks are mashed into a creamy, rich filling.
Egg yolks
Provide richness and a smooth, creamy texture once pounded with the seasonings.

The step that matters

Boil the eggs for 20 minutes. Boiling long enough fully sets the yolks so they crumble and mash smoothly. Undercooked yolks stay runny and make the filling hard to pound and shape, while overcooking can leave a grey ring around the yolk.

“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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