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Breakfast

Broiled Eggs

A dish of eggs broiled on buttered toast, seasoned with pepper and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Broiled Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast

  1. Make and butter the toast; cut into equal pieces.

  2. Arrange the toast on a very hot dish.

Cook the eggs

  1. Carefully lay one raw egg on each piece of toast.

  2. Hold a red-hot shovel over the eggs until they are browned.

  3. Dust lightly with pepper and squeeze a little lemon juice over each egg.

  4. Serve immediately while hot and nicely garnished.

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. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

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

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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
Set and brown on top while the yolk stays soft, forming the main body of the dish.
Buttered toast
Provides a crisp, absorbent base that holds the egg and adds richness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich egg and butter flavours.

The step that matters

Hold the shovel over the eggs until browned. Heat from above must set the white and brown the surface without overcooking the yolk. Too little heat leaves the white runny; too much dries or hardens the yolk before the top colours.

“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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