Name: Devilled Biscuits
Ingredients: cayenne pepper; curry powder; pounded yolks of hard-boiled eggs; buttered whole-meal biscuits

Why it works: Pepper and biscuit work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 841 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Devilled Biscuits

Ingredients

cayenne pepper
curry powder
pounded yolks of hard-boiled eggs
buttered whole-meal biscuits

Directions

Make the paste

Make a paste by mixing cayenne, curry powder, and pounded yolks of hard-boiled eggs.

Prepare and serve

Grill the buttered whole-meal biscuits until hot.
Spread the paste on the biscuits.
Serve hot, stacking one biscuit on top of another to keep the paste on.

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.

Pepper + biscuittop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together841 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Egg + biscuittop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,643 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Pepper + eggtop 33% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together50,580 recipes

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

Pepper and egg 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

Hard-boiled egg yolks: Provide the rich, creamy base that binds the paste together and carries the spices.
Buttered whole-meal biscuits: Supply the sturdy base that holds the paste and gains toasty flavour from grilling.
Curry powder: Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the paste.
Cayenne pepper: Adds sharp heat that contrasts with the rich yolks.

“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.