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Deviled Eggs

Hard-boiled eggs filled with a lemony yolk mixture and topped with stuffed olives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Deviled Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Simmer the eggs slowly for 20 minutes.

  2. Cool the eggs in cold water, then peel and cut in halves lengthwise.

Make and fill

  1. In a small bowl, mix the yolks with lemon juice, salt, melted butter, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Cream the mixture well and fill the egg halves with it.

  3. Place a stuffed olive in the center of each filled egg half.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + olivetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,263 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Butter + olivetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,887 recipes

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

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide the whites that hold the filling and the yolks that form the creamy base.
Melted butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the yolk filling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich yolk filling.

The step that matters

Cream the mixture well. Beating the yolks with butter and lemon until smooth breaks up lumps and emulsifies the fat, so the filling is even and piped or spooned without gaps.

“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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