Skip to main content
Breakfast

Ordinary Diet

A simple daily diet plan with specified portions of bread, butter, tea, coffee, broth, meat, fish, and potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beef and chicken match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,148 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Ordinary Diet

Ingredients

Directions

Breakfast

  1. Serve 4 oz. of bread with 2 oz. of butter and a pinch of coarse sea salt for breakfast.

  2. Brew 4 cups of tea.

Dinner

  1. Serve 6 oz. of bread with 2 pints of broth or soup for dinner.

  2. Choose one of the following: 4 oz. of boiled beef or mutton, 4 oz. of trimmed beef steak, 6 oz. of mutton chop, 1/5 of a chicken, or 8 oz. of cleaned fresh fish.

  3. If potatoes are in season, substitute 1 lb. of potatoes for bread.

Supper

  1. Serve 4 oz. of bread with 1 oz. of butter and 4 cups of 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. Beef + chickentop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,148 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

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

  3. Chicken + potatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,756 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-decenal (green, must).

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

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  5. Beef + muttontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,373 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Provides the bulk of each meal, supplying starch and filling carbohydrate.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the bread, carrying flavour and softening its texture.
Beef or mutton
Supplies the main protein of the dinner course, adding savoury, meaty flavour.
Potatoes
Can replace bread at dinner, adding starch that softens and absorbs broth flavour.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, tea, beef, mutton, chicken, fish. 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.

More ordinary diet recipes

Half 4 See all 17 →

You might also like

Rice GruelRice Gruel28 recipesPeptoned Milk GruelPeptoned Milk Gruel9 recipes