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Rolled Bread and Butter

A simple dish of thinly sliced bread rolled with butter, seasoned with salt, parsley, and served on watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 469 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Rolled Bread and Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Use bread that is spongy and elastic, cut into very thin slices with a sharp knife.

  2. Butter each slice before cutting and remove the crust unless it is very soft.

Roll and arrange

  1. Roll each slice into a bolster shape, pressing gently to make the folds adhere.

  2. Arrange the rolls in a pyramid on a lace dish paper and garnish with fresh parsley.

  3. For variation, spread the bread with savory butter, shrimp, sardine, or anchovy.

  4. Sprinkle the outside of the rolls with finely minced parsley and lobster coral or red crumbs.

  5. Serve on a bed of well-seasoned watercress.

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. Parsley + watercresstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

  4. Bread + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

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

  5. Bread + watercresstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh bread
Its spongy, elastic crumb lets thin slices roll without cracking.
Butter
Spread on each slice, it adds richness and helps the folds stick together.

The step that matters

Cutting very thin slices from fresh bread. Bread older than about a day has a drier, firmer crumb that cracks when rolled. Thin, fresh, elastic slices bend without tearing, so the rolls hold their shape.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, watercress. 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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