Name: To Preserve Eggs
Ingredients: 1 gallon water; 1 pound unslaked lime; eggs

Why it works: Lime and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,658 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

To Preserve Eggs

Ingredients

1 gallon water
1 pound unslaked lime
eggs

Directions

Make the lime solution

Pour 1 gallon of water over 1 pound of unslaked lime and stir well.
The next day, pour off the clear water into a jar.

Preserve the eggs

Add the eggs as they are laid into the jar.
This method will keep the eggs good for six months or more.

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.

Lime + eggtop 34% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,658 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

Unslaked lime: Reacts with water to form an alkaline solution that helps preserve the eggs.
Eggs: The food being preserved; they are submerged in the alkaline solution.

“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.