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A Paste for Stewed Beef or Soups

A simple paste made from eggs, salt, and flour, boiled to use in stewed beef or soups.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

A Paste for Stewed Beef or Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the paste

  1. Break the eggs into a bowl and add salt.

  2. Mix in enough flour to form a paste.

  3. Roll the paste out thin, about ½ inch thick.

Cook

  1. Bring a pot of water to a boil and add a little coarse sea salt.

  2. Place the paste in the boiling water for 10 minutes, stirring frequently to prevent sticking.

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 + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Bind the flour into a cohesive dough and add richness and structure to the paste.
Flour
Provides the body that turns the egg mixture into a workable paste that holds its shape.

The step that matters

Stirring while the paste boils. Stirring frequently keeps the paste pieces moving so their starch surfaces do not stick to each other or to the pot. Sticking leaves dense lumps and uneven cooking.

“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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