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Minced Eggs

A custard-like dish of chopped hard‑boiled eggs cooked in milk, butter, flour, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Minced Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the hard-boiled eggs, but do not mince them too fine.

Make the sauce

  1. In a suitable dish, heat the milk, butter, salt, pepper, and chopped savory herbs over medium heat.

  2. Once it comes to a boil, stir in the flour dissolved in a little cold milk.

  3. Cook until the mixture thickens like cream, then gently fold in the minced eggs.

  4. Add any optional flavorings if desired.

Serve

  1. Stir gently for a few moments and serve garnished with snippets of toast.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

  4. Milk + mushroomtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  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

Hard-boiled eggs
Form the main body of the dish, bulking out the creamy sauce with chopped texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the creamy sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a creamy sauce when cooked after boiling.
Savory herbs
Add aroma and savory flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour. Flour dissolved in cold milk must be added once the milk boils and cooked until it thickens; adding it to hot milk undissolved or undercooking it leaves the sauce lumpy or floury-tasting, because starch needs heat to swell and thicken.

“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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