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Breakfast

Nice Breakfast Dish

A breakfast dish of boiled eggs blended with buttered milk and curry, served on hot buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Nice Breakfast Dish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the eggs hard, then remove the yolks and rub them smooth.

  2. Chop the egg whites finely.

  3. In a saucepan, rub the flour with the butter until smooth, then stir in the boiling milk.

  4. Cook thoroughly and season with pepper and salt.

  5. If you can't use cream, add more butter.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the chopped egg and heat until hot but do not boil.

  2. Stir in a dash of red pepper and the curry powder.

  3. Serve the mixture on hot buttered toast.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter 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

Eggs
The yolks are rubbed smooth to enrich the sauce, and the chopped whites add body and texture.
Flour
Rubbed with the butter, it thickens the milk into a smooth, stable sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and flavor and helps the flour blend smoothly.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as the flour cooks.
Curry powder
Adds the warm, aromatic spice flavor that defines the dish.

The step that matters

Heat without boiling. Once the chopped egg is added, boiling can toughen egg proteins and make the sauce grainy or curdled, so heat only until hot.

“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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