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Poached Eggs with Sorrel or Endive

Poached eggs served on toasted bread with a sauce of sorrel, butter, cayenne, ham essence, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 231 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Poached Eggs with Sorrel or Endive

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast

  1. Cut the bread into a round slice to cover three parts of a dish.

  2. Fry the bread in boiling lard until light in color, then drain and keep warm.

Make the sorrel sauce

  1. In a stewpan, combine the chopped sorrel, butter, cayenne pepper, and essence of ham.

  2. Simmer until done, then thicken with flour and water, and boil for five minutes.

Poach and serve

  1. Butter the toast, poach the eggs, and drain them.

  2. Place the poached eggs over the bread, pour the sorrel sauce around, and serve hot.

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. Sorrel + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  4. Sorrel + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together419 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Eggs
Provide the main dish, setting when poached while staying soft inside.
Sorrel
Adds a sharp, lemony acidity and fresh green flavor to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks, giving it body.
Bread
Forms a crisp, browned base that holds the eggs.
Lard
Fries the bread, adding fat for browning and richness.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce with flour and water. Flour must be cooked long enough in liquid to lose its raw taste and thicken fully. Boiling for the stated five minutes helps starch swell and set the sauce smoothly, while adding the mixture gradually prevents lumps.

Swap the sorrel

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Sorrelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, pepper, ham, flour, egg. 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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