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Ham Toast

Ham toast made with boiled eggs, ham, and butter, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Ham Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil the eggs hard.

  2. Mince the ham finely.

  3. Once the eggs are cold, shell and chop them.

  4. Mix the chopped eggs with the ham.

  5. Season the mixture with Nepaul pepper and salt if needed.

Prepare the toast

  1. Remove the crusts from the bread.

  2. Cut the bread in half.

  3. Fry the bread halves in lard or butter.

Finish and serve

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter.

  2. Add the ham and egg mixture to the melted butter.

  3. Heat the mixture thoroughly.

  4. Serve the hot mixture piled on the toast or croutons immediately.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Ham + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ham
Provides the main savoury, meaty flavour of the filling.
Eggs (in the method)
Add richness and body to the chopped filling.
Butter
Adds fat, richness and flavour to the hot mixture.
Bread
Forms the crisp base that holds the hot filling.

The step that matters

Serve the mixture immediately. Hot, moist filling soaks into fried bread as it sits, so the toast turns soggy and loses its crispness. Serving right after heating keeps the contrast between crisp bread and warm filling.

“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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