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 ↓
To Bake a Sucking Pig
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Clean and stuff the pig as you would for roasting.
Mix the yolk of the raw egg with the salad oil and rub it all over the pig.
Cover the ears with buttered paper.
Bake and serve
Send the pig to the bakehouse with a piece of clean rag containing the butter for basting.
Prepare gravy and sauce to serve with the pig.
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.
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Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Sucking pig
- Is the whole main dish, cooked through and served as the centrepiece.
- Raw egg yolk
- Adds richness and helps the rubbed-on coating brown evenly in the oven.
- Salad oil
- Carries the egg yolk over the skin and helps the surface crisp and brown.
- Butter
- Used for basting, adding fat and flavour and encouraging a golden surface.
The step that matters
Covering the ears with buttered paper. Thin ears brown and burn much faster than the thick body. Shielding them with buttered paper slows browning so they do not char before the pig is cooked through.
“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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