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Brown Buttered Eggs

A baked egg dish topped with a brown butter and tarragon vinegar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,563 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Brown Buttered Eggs

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a small saucepan, melt the butter until very dark, almost black.

  2. Quickly add the tarragon vinegar and cook for a moment longer.

  3. Stir in the chopped parsley and keep warm.

Bake and serve

  1. In a small buttered baking dish, crack the eggs and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  2. Bake in the oven until the whites are set.

  3. Pour the sauce over the eggs and serve.

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. Tarragon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Vinegar + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,477 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set into a delicate structure as the whites cook, forming the body of the dish.
Butter
Browns and turns nutty in the pan, giving the sauce its deep, toasty flavor.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that cuts the richness of the browned butter.

The step that matters

Melt the butter until very dark. Butter solids brown as its water evaporates and its milk proteins caramelize. Stopping too early leaves a pale, flat sauce, while going past dark brown turns it bitter. Watch closely and add the vinegar quickly to halt the browning.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, tarragon, vinegar, egg):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Dillfits about as well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, tarragon, vinegar, 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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