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Anchovy Eggs

A dish of hard‑boiled eggs filled with anchovy and butter mixture, served on buttered bread and garnished with watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Anchovy Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Boil the eggs for 20 minutes, then place them in cold water and remove the shells.

  2. Cut a small piece off both ends of each egg, then cut them in half and remove the yolks.

Make the filling

  1. Wash, bone, and pound the anchovies, then rub them through a sieve with the egg yolks.

  2. Season the mixture with pepper and cayenne, then add the melted butter and mix well.

Assemble and serve

  1. Fill each half egg with the anchovy mixture, place one on each buttered slice of bread, and garnish with watercress.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Bread + watercresstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled eggs
Provide the body of the dish; the yolks are mashed into the filling.
Anchovies
Supply a salty, savoury flavour that gives the filling its character.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth texture to the yolk and anchovy mixture.

The step that matters

Rubbing the anchovies and yolks through a sieve. Pressing the mixture through a sieve breaks down the anchovy flesh and yolk into fine particles, producing a smooth, even filling without lumps of fish. Pounding first helps the anchovies pass through the sieve more easily.

“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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