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Hard-boiled eggs topped with a ketchup-flour sauce and parsley garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Boil and peel

  1. Boil the eggs hard.

  2. Place the boiled eggs in cold water.

  3. Peel the eggs without breaking the whites.

Prepare and plate

  1. Cut a small bit off the end of 4 eggs so they stand upright on a dish.

  2. Split the other 4 eggs through the middle and lay them around the upright eggs.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a saucepan, heat flour, water, butter, and ketchup.

  2. Add chopped parsley and pour the sauce over the eggs.

  3. Garnish with small branches of curled parsley.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Eggs
Provide the main body of the dish; boiling sets the whites and yolks firm.
Flour
Thickens the heated liquid into a smooth, pourable sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a silky mouthfeel in the sauce.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity, giving the sauce its flavour and colour.

The step that matters

Peel the eggs without breaking the whites. Boiled egg whites are tender and tear easily, especially when the shell is stuck to them. Cooling the eggs in cold water causes the white to contract slightly away from the shell, which helps keep the surface intact while peeling.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Tarragonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, butter, ketchup. 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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