Name: Curried Eggs
Ingredients: 3 hard-cooked eggs; 2 tablespoons flour; ¼ teaspoon salt; ¼ teaspoon pepper; 3 tablespoons curry powder; 2 tablespoons butter; 1 cup milk

Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Curried Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

Make a sauce by melting butter in a pan, then whisk in flour, milk, salt, pepper, and curry powder until smooth.

Assemble and serve

Cut the hard-cooked eggs into quarters and place them on a serving dish or on toast.
Pour the sauce over the eggs and garnish with toast points and 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.

Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78,219 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together106,462 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 body of the dish, holding their shape as quartered pieces under the sauce.
Flour: Thickens the melted butter and milk into a smooth, coating sauce.
Butter: Fat that cooks the flour and carries the curry flavour into the sauce.
Milk: Liquid that turns the flour-thickened base into a creamy sauce.
Curry powder: Supplies the spiced, aromatic flavour that defines the sauce.

“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.