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Dessert

Modern Cookery

A pastry dish made with chopped hard‑boiled egg yolks, butter, salt, spices, and broth, baked in a rolled‑out crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour 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 ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Chop the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs and place them in a dish.

  2. Add plenty of butter and season with coarse sea salt and spices.

  3. Pour in cold water or veal broth for gravy.

Assemble and bake

  1. Roll out the cover to ¾ inch thick and secure it around the edge.

  2. Ornament the cover as desired and bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 1 hour or more.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + vealtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Egg + vealtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,845 recipes

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

Butter and flour 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

Hard-boiled egg yolks
Provide the rich, crumbly body of the filling once chopped.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, savoury mouthfeel in the filling.
Cold water or veal broth
Adds moisture to form a gravy that keeps the filling from drying out while baking.
Flour
Forms the pastry cover that encloses the filling and holds in moisture.

The step that matters

Pour in the liquid before sealing the cover. Cold liquid added to the filling supplies the moisture that turns into gravy during baking. Without enough liquid the yolks can dry out and the filling becomes dense and crumbly rather than moist.

“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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