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Steamed Eggs

A simple dish of eggs steamed until the whites set, served with salt, pepper, and melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Steamed Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter five patty pans and break an egg into each one.

  2. Place the pans in a steamer over a kettle of boiling water.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam until the whites are cooked.

  2. Transfer to a hot platter, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and pour melted butter over the top.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

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

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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
Set into a tender custard-like structure as the proteins coagulate with gentle steam heat.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a silky mouthfeel, and carries flavor over the finished eggs.

The step that matters

Steam until the whites are cooked. Egg proteins set at moderate heat, and prolonged or high steam makes the whites rubbery and dries the yolks. Check the whites as they turn opaque and pull the pans promptly.

“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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