Name: Stuffed Eggs
Ingredients: 1 hard-boiled egg; 1½ oz. butter; 2 teaspoons chopped parsley; Salt and pepper to taste; 1 tablespoon chopped ham, shrimp, chicken, tongue, or anchovies

Why it works: Parsley and pepper 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 ↓

Stuffed Eggs

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

1 hard-boiled egg
1½ oz. butter
2 teaspoons chopped parsley
Salt and pepper to taste
1 tablespoon chopped ham, shrimp, chicken, tongue, or anchovies

Directions

Prepare the eggs

Shell the hard-boiled egg and cut a little off each end.
Cut the egg in half crosswise and remove the yolks.

Fill and serve

Mix the yolks with butter, parsley, salt, pepper, and your choice of filling.
Form the mixture into small balls and place one in each half of the egg white.
Sprinkle with parsley and serve cold, or heat and serve on toast.

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.

Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together28,563 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Butter + hamtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,475 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Egg + hamtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,526 recipes

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

Butter: Adds fat and richness, giving the yolk filling a smooth, creamy texture.
Hard-boiled egg: Provides the white shell for holding the filling and the yolk for the filling base.

“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.