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Breakfast

Fried Eggs

A simple fried egg cooked in clarified butter with pepper and salt.

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 ↓

Fried Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat clarified butter in a frying pan.

  2. Break the eggs one at a time into the pan.

  3. Add a little pepper and salt.

  4. Turn the eggs halfway over when they start to set.

  5. Remove the eggs and place them on a dish.

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
The eggs set into a firm white around a soft yolk when cooked in hot fat.
Clarified butter
Provides the hot fat that cooks the eggs and adds a rich, nutty flavour.

The step that matters

Turn the eggs halfway over when they start to set. Turning too early breaks the yolk and too late overcooks the top. Waiting until the whites have set enough to hold their shape lets the eggs flip cleanly while the yolk stays runny.

“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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