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Creamed Ham with Poached Eggs

Creamy ham sauce served over toast topped with poached eggs.

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 ↓

Creamed Ham with Poached Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a double boiler, combine the milk, celery, and onion. Cook for 15 minutes.

  2. Remove the celery and onion. Stir in the butter and flour until smooth.

  3. Cook the mixture for 10 minutes until it thickens.

  4. Add the chopped ham and let it heat through.

Assemble and serve

  1. Dip the edges of the toast in boiling salted water and place on a hot serving dish.

  2. Spread the toast lightly with butter, then top with the ham mixture.

  3. Carefully place poached eggs on 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 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

Milk
Forms the base of the sauce and, with flour, gives it a smooth, creamy body.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and adds flavor, and softens the toast when spread.
Flour
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the ham mixture a creamy consistency.
Cold boiled ham
Provides the savory meat base that is heated through in the sauce.
Eggs
Poached eggs add a soft, runny yolk that enriches the dish when broken over it.

The step that matters

Cook the flour and butter mixture until it thickens. Stirring the butter and flour into hot milk and cooking it fully lets the starch swell and gelatinize, which thickens the sauce; undercooking leaves a raw, pasty taste and a thin sauce.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, onion, butter, flour, ham, egg):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, onion, butter, flour, ham, 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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