Skip to main content
Preserve

To Preserve Eggs

Preserve eggs by soaking them in a lime and salt solution.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lime and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,289 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Preserve Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the brine

  1. Dissolve the quick lime and salt in 1 gallon of boiling water.

  2. Let the mixture cool, then pour it over the eggs in a large vessel until they are covered.

  3. Use a stone jar of about six quarts for storage.

Pack the eggs

  1. Pack the eggs with the large end down, covering them tightly and placing them in a cool place.

  2. Alternatively, coat the eggs with butter or lard, then pack them in sawdust or bran, ensuring they do not touch each other.

  3. You can also coat the eggs with melted paraffin for preservation.

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. Lime + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Lime + buttertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,339 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

Quick-lime
Makes the liquid strongly alkaline, which helps preserve the eggs.
Salt
Adds saltiness and helps preserve the eggs by drawing out moisture.
Butter or lard
Forms a fat coating that seals the shell against air.
Paraffin
Forms a waxy coating that seals the shell against air.

The step that matters

Pack the eggs with the large end down. Keeping the large end down holds the air cell at the top, so the egg stays stable and the yolk stays away from the air space during storage.

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, butter):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limethe original
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, butter. 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.

More preserve eggs recipes

for Winter 3 See all 16 →

You might also like

Green Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding64 recipesCornmeal mushCornmeal mush12 recipes