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Egg Salmagundi

A creamy egg dish with butter, sugar, cream, lemon, served with pastry or butter‑fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Egg Salmagundi

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat the eggs well.

  2. Mix the eggs with the sugar, cream, and juice of the lemon.

  3. Melt the butter and pour it into the mixture.

  4. Stir until it thickens.

Serve

  1. Serve with fingers of Milan pastry or bread fried in butter.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 mixture as they cook, giving it a custard-like body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the mixture.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the set of the eggs.
Sifted sugar
Sweetens the mixture and dissolves smoothly when sifted.
Lemon
Adds acidity and brightness that balances the sugar and richness.

The step that matters

Stir until it thickens. Egg proteins set gently as they warm, so heat must stay low and the mixture must be stirred constantly. Overheating or stopping early can cause curdling or leave it runny.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, cream, sugar. 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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