Skip to main content
Dessert

Common Diet

A simple weekly diet plan with specified portions of tea, bread, butter, beef, potatoes, soup, and roast meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Common Diet

Ingredients

Directions

Breakfast

  1. Serve 1 pint of tea or coffee with 5 oz. of bread and 1 oz. of butter for breakfast.

  2. Alternatively, have boiled bread and milk or porridge with milk.

Dinner and supper

  1. Roast 6 oz. of beef and serve with 4 oz. of bread and 8 oz. of potatoes for dinner on Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday.

  2. Serve 1 pint of good soup with 2 oz. of roast meat and 4 oz. of bread on Monday.

  3. Prepare potato hash with 4 oz. of bread or serve cold meat with 8 oz. of potatoes and 4 oz. of bread on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

  4. Repeat breakfast but omit coffee 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Tea + potatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together136 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Beef + meattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,533 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Bread + beeftop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

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

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

Swap the potato

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

  1. Potatothe original
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Asparagusfits less well
  4. Onionfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against tea, bread, butter, beef, meat. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like

Orange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesDeep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipes