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Kedgeree

A British dish of buttered rice, fish, eggs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Kedgeree

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Add the boiled and dried rice and stir for 1 minute.

  3. Add the cooked fish, salt, pepper, and nutmeg or cayenne.

  4. Stir in the diced hard-boiled eggs and heat until hot.

  5. Serve in a pile, garnishing with sieved egg yolks on top if desired.

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. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  2. Rice + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,779 recipes

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

  3. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

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

  4. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  5. Rice + fishtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together270 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

Rice
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs the buttery coating, giving it body.
Fish
Supplies the main flavour and flaked texture that define the dish.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a soft, creamy texture through the rice and fish.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps coat the grains so they stay separate.

The step that matters

Stir in the diced hard-boiled eggs and heat until hot.. Eggs are already cooked, so the aim is only to warm them through. Overheating makes the yolks dry and crumbly and can toughen the fish, so keep the heat gentle and the stirring light.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, rice, fish, pepper, egg. 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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