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Minced Eggs

Creamy egg mixture with herbs, thickened with flour, served with toast garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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. Heat the milk, butter, salt, pepper, and chopped savory herbs over the fire until boiling.

  2. Dissolve the flour in a little cold milk and stir it into the boiling mixture.

  3. Cook until thick like cream, then gently stir in the minced eggs.

Serve

  1. Serve garnished with sippets 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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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, giving it substance and a soft, tender texture.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that thickens into the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the milk as it heats, so the sauce becomes creamy rather than watery.
Savory herbs
Add aroma and a savory flavor to the warm milk sauce.

The step that matters

Cook until thick like cream, then add the eggs gently. Flour thickens only once the mixture reaches a boil and is cooked through; stirring too early leaves it thin and floury. Adding the eggs gently keeps the pieces intact rather than breaking them down into a paste.

“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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