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To Preserve Eggs

A method for preserving eggs using quick lime, salt, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 lime liquid

  1. In a large vessel, combine the quick-lime and salt.

  2. Slack the mixture with 1 gallon of boiling water until it thickens like cream.

  3. Once cooled, pour off the clear liquid on top.

Cover the eggs

  1. Drain this liquid and pour it over the eggs, ensuring they are fully covered.

  2. Use a stone jar that holds about 6 quarts for best results.

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 + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Lime + eggtop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,658 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Quick-lime
Makes the liquid strongly alkaline, which slowly changes and firms the egg proteins.
Eggs
Their proteins gel and set as the alkaline liquid penetrates the shell over time.

The step that matters

Ensuring the eggs are fully covered. Any part of an egg left above the liquid is not preserved evenly, so the eggs should stay completely submerged. The alkaline liquid must reach the whole shell for the proteins to change uniformly.

Swap the lime

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, 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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