Skip to main content
Main

Creamed Eggs

A dish of hard‑boiled eggs topped with a white sauce of butter, flour, milk, peas, and seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Creamed Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shell the eggs and cut off a little of the end so they stand up alone.

Make the sauce

  1. Make a thick white sauce by melting butter, adding flour, and gradually whisking in milk until thickened.

  2. Add peas to the white sauce and season with salt and pepper.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over the eggs.

  2. Garnish with parsley and the grated yolk of one egg.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Peas + parsleytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,885 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and adds richness to its flavour.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth white sauce as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that coats the eggs and peas.
Hard boiled eggs
Form the body of the dish, sitting upright in the sauce.
Peas
Add sweetness and a tender texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Make a thick white sauce by melting butter, adding flour, and gradually whisking in milk until thickened.. Adding milk gradually while whisking keeps the flour smooth and lump-free. Cooking the flour-butter mixture lets it thicken evenly into a sauce that coats the eggs.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, flour, pepper, butter, parsley):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, flour, pepper, butter, parsley. 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.

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes