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Preserve

Common Diet

A simple weekly diet plan with porridge, tea, soup, beef or mutton, potatoes, and boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Tea and rice work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 197 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Common Diet

Ingredients

Directions

Breakfast

  1. Prepare 1 pint of porridge.

  2. Serve the porridge with ½ cup of milk or 1 pint of tea for breakfast.

Lunch and dinner

  1. Serve 1 pint of soup for lunch.

  2. Roast or boil 6 oz. of beef or mutton.

  3. Serve the cooked beef or mutton with potatoes for dinner.

  4. Serve 1 pint of tea for tea.

Supper

  1. On Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, serve ½ cup of milk for supper.

  2. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, serve ½ cup of boiled rice and milk for supper.

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. Tea + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together197 recipes

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

  2. Potato + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together851 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  5. Milk + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

What each ingredient does

Porridge
Forms the base of the breakfast meal, providing bulk and filling starch.
Beef or mutton
Provides the main protein of the dinner, becoming firm and savoury when roasted or boiled.
Potatoes
Adds starch that makes the dinner more filling and substantial.
Boiled rice
Adds soft, starchy bulk to the supper meal.

“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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