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Egg Fricassee

A dish of boiled eggs mixed with gravy, herbs, nutmeg, butter, and fried artichoke bottoms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and artichoke match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 156 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Egg Fricassee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the eggs and remove several yolks whole.

  2. Cut the remaining yolks and whites into quarters.

  3. Fry artichoke bottoms in thin slices.

Make the fricassee

  1. Heat some gravy with mixed herbs until boiling.

  2. Add the eggs and a little grated nutmeg.

  3. Stir in a bit of butter until the mixture thickens.

Serve

  1. Serve garnished with finely shredded eggs.

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. Nutmeg + artichoketop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together156 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + artichoketop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together893 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Egg + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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
Set and thicken the sauce, and form the main body of the dish.
Gravy
Provides the liquid base that the eggs cook into and carries the flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth texture to the thickened mixture.
Artichoke bottoms
Adds a firm, tender texture as a fried component.

The step that matters

Stir in the butter until the mixture thickens. Egg proteins set with gentle heat, so the mixture can curdle or turn grainy if it boils hard. Keep the heat moderate and stir steadily to get a smooth, thickened sauce.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, artichoke):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Nutmegthe original
  4. Tarragonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, artichoke. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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