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Poached Eggs

Poached eggs served on buttered toast with butter and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Poached Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Break the desired number of eggs, one at a time, and drop them carefully into a pot of boiling water.

  2. When the egg whites are set, use a spoon to lift them out.

  3. Place each poached egg on a small piece of buttered toast on a platter.

  4. Add a small piece of butter on each egg and a dash of pepper.

  5. Serve 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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

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

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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
Egg whites set around the yolk in the hot water, forming the poached egg's main structure.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel as it melts over the warm egg.
Buttered toast
Gives a crisp, absorbent base that holds the egg and soaks up the yolk.

The step that matters

Dropping the eggs into the water. Eggs dropped into boiling water can scatter and spread, so adding each egg one at a time, carefully, helps the whites gather around the yolk and set in a compact shape.

“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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