Skip to main content
Main

Egg Patties

Egg patties made by mixing chopped hard‑boiled eggs with white sauce, lemon juice, parsley, and seasonings, then heating and filling patty cases.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Egg Patties

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Chop the hard-boiled eggs finely.

  2. Add the chopped eggs to the white sauce along with lemon juice, parsley, and seasonings.

  3. Heat the mixture in a pan of boiling water until hot.

  4. Fill the patty cases with the egg mixture.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Parsley + macetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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 eggs
Provide the main filling, giving the patties substance and a firm, rich texture.
White sauce
Binds the chopped eggs together and keeps the filling moist and creamy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich egg and sauce flavour.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, lemon, parsley, egg, pepper):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, lemon, parsley, egg, pepper. 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.

You might also like