Skip to main content
Main

Fried Eggs

A simple fried egg cooked in clarified butter with pepper and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Fried Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Heat clarified butter in a frying pan.

  2. Break the eggs into the pan one at a time.

  3. Add a little pepper and salt.

Fry and serve

  1. Turn the eggs half over and fry until nicely browned but not hard.

  2. Remove the eggs and place them on a dish.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  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
Form the main body of the dish, setting into firm whites with a softer yolk.
Clarified butter
Conducts heat evenly and fries the eggs while adding rich flavour and browning.

The step that matters

Turning the eggs and frying until nicely browned but not hard. Eggs set quickly under high heat, so turning them too late or cooking too long makes the yolks firm and the whites tough. Watching the heat keeps the whites set while the yolks stay soft.

“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.

More fried eggs recipes

with Bacon 8Breaded 4and Bacon 4with Tomatoes 4with Tomato Sauce 3 See all 85 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes