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Egg Pap

A thickened egg mixture made by adding a batter of flour and egg yolks to boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Pap

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Set a quart of water on a brisk fire.

  2. Mix the flour with the egg yolks and a little cold water to form a batter.

Cook

  1. When the water is ready to boil, stir in the batter before it boils.

  2. Keep stirring until it thickens.

  3. Remove from heat, add salt, and pour into a basin.

  4. Let it cool until it is warm like fresh milk.

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 + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Egg yolks
Enrich the batter with fat and emulsifiers, giving a smooth, rich texture as it thickens.
Wheaten flour
Starch thickens the water as it heats, turning the liquid into a smooth pap.

The step that matters

Stir in the batter before the water boils. Adding the batter to water that is ready but not yet boiling lets the starch disperse evenly. Added to a rolling boil, the flour can clump and cook unevenly.

“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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