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Egg and Ham Patties

A patty made from stale bread, minced ham, brown sauce, cayenne pepper, lemon juice, and topped with a poached egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Egg and Ham Patties

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Cut four or five rounds from the stale bread using a 2-inch round cutter.

  2. Use a smaller cutter to press through the center of each round and remove the inner bread.

  3. Heat a large pan of lard until boiling.

  4. Fry the bread shapes until light brown, then drain on a clean cloth.

Make the ham filling

  1. In a pan, combine the minced ham and brown sauce, and heat for a few minutes.

  2. Add cayenne pepper and lemon juice to the ham mixture.

Assemble and serve

  1. Fill the fried bread shapes with the ham mixture and top each with a poached egg.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Bread + hamtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

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

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  5. Ham + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,526 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the crisp base that holds the filling when fried.
Lean ham
Provides the savoury, meaty body of the filling.
Brown sauce
Adds moisture and rich, savoury flavour to the ham.
Eggs
Set when poached, adding soft richness on top of the patties.

The step that matters

Frying the bread shapes until light brown. Frying in very hot lard seals the surface quickly, so the bread turns crisp and resists soaking up fat. Overcooking darkens it and makes it bitter, while undercooking leaves it greasy and soft.

“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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