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Anchovy Eggs

Hard‑boiled eggs filled with anchovy paste, butter, and spices, then colored red and green.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and anchovy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,330 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Anchovy Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Cut the hard-boiled eggs in half and carefully remove the yolks.

  2. Slice a small piece from the end of the egg whites.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, pound together the yolks, butter, and anchovy paste.

  2. Add cayenne, salt, and pepper to the mixture and fill the egg whites.

Decorate and serve

  1. Color the remaining mixture half red and half green.

  2. Rub the colored mixture through a fine sieve to decorate the eggs.

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 + anchovytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,330 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Anchovy + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Anchovy + peppertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Provide the rich, creamy base that gives the filling its body.
Butter
Adds fat and smoothness, helping the pounded yolks hold together as a spreadable filling.
Anchovy paste
Supplies a salty, savoury flavour that is the dominant taste of the filling.

The step that matters

Pounding the yolks, butter, and anchovy paste together. The yolks and butter must be worked into a smooth, uniform paste; lumps or unevenly mixed fat will make the filling grainy and hard to pipe or spoon into the whites neatly.

“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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