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Arrowroot Omelette

A light omelette made with arrowroot, milk, eggs, butter, and flavored with sugar and orange flower water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Arrowroot Omelette

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Moisten the arrowroot.

  2. Stir the arrowroot into the milk.

  3. Flavor the milk with sugar and orange flower water.

  4. Boil the mixture for ten minutes.

  5. Let the mixture cool.

Cook the omelette

  1. Add the well-beaten eggs to the cooled mixture.

  2. Melt the butter in a frying pan until it bubbles.

  3. Pour the mixture into the frying pan and fry for three minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with lemon or jam.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Arrowroot + orangetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk into a smooth mixture that sets when cooked.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the arrowroot thickens and the eggs enrich.
Eggs
Add structure and set the mixture as it fries, giving the omelette body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and helps the omelette brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the eggs. Adding beaten eggs to a very hot mixture can scramble them unevenly, so letting it cool first keeps the eggs smooth and evenly set.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, orange, egg, butter, lemon):

  1. Sweet potatofits about as well
  2. Asparagusfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, orange, egg, butter, lemon. 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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