Name: Keeping Eggs Fresh
Ingredients: small, clean wooden or tin vessels (10 to 20 gallons); fine-ground land plaster; fresh eggs; unslacked lime (1 pint); coarse salt (1 pint); water

Why it works: Egg and lime are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,658 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Keeping Eggs Fresh

Ingredients

Directions

Pack the vessel

Place 2-3 inches of fine-ground land plaster at the bottom of the vessel.
Stand fresh eggs upright, small end down, close together without crowding to form the first layer.
Add more plaster to support the eggs and create a second layer.
Continue layering eggs and plaster until the vessel is full, finishing with a layer of plaster on top.

Make the lime water

For lime water, mix 1 pint of unslacked lime and 1 pint of coarse salt in a pail of water.
Store the lime water in a cool place.
Make a fresh supply of lime water every few months.

Add eggs as laid

Add fresh eggs as soon as they are laid.

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.

Egg + limetop 34% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,658 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

Fresh eggs: The food being preserved; they are kept whole and unwashed in the packing.
Fine-ground land plaster: Surrounds and separates the eggs, supporting them so they do not crowd or touch.
Unslacked lime: Makes the lime water alkaline, the solution that the preserving liquid depends on.

“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.