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Egg Flip

A sweet alcoholic beverage made by heating eggs, sugar, rum, ale, spices, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Egg Flip

Why it works: Rum and ginger work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 229 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Egg Flip

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Break the eggs into a jug and heat with the sugar and spice.

  2. Heat the ale and pour it over the eggs, beating well continuously.

  3. Heat the mixture together and add the rum.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Rum + gingertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together229 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Sugar + rumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Egg + rumtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,589 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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
Thicken the drink as their proteins set with gentle heat.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the sharpness of the ale and rum.
Rum
Adds alcohol warmth and aroma to the finished drink.
Ale
Provides the liquid base and its malty flavour.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot ale over the eggs. Eggs can scramble if hot liquid reaches them unevenly. Beating constantly spreads the heat so the egg proteins thicken smoothly instead of curdling.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, rum):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerthe original
  4. Allspicefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, rum. 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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