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Hard-boiled eggs served with a sauce of flour, water, butter, ketchup, and parsley.

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

Prepare the eggs

  1. Boil 8 eggs until hard, then place them in cold water.

  2. Peel the eggs without breaking the whites.

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

  4. Split the other 4 eggs in half and lay them around the upright eggs.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Heat flour, water, butter, and ketchup in a saucepan.

  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 structure and protein body of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the eggs instead of running off.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy mouthfeel to the sauce.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness, acidity and colour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Heat the flour, water, butter and ketchup. Flour must be heated long enough to cook out its raw starch, and the mixture stirred so it thickens smoothly without lumps. Undercooked flour leaves a pasty taste and a sauce that is too thin to cling to the eggs.

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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