Name: Breakfast
Ingredients: 4 oz bread; 1 oz butter; salt to taste; 4 cups tea

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 ↓

Breakfast

Ingredients

4 oz bread
1 oz butter
salt to taste
4 cups tea

Directions

Prepare

Slice the bread into portions.
Spread butter on the bread.
Add salt if desired.

Serve

Brew the tea and serve hot.

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.

Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Bread + teatop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together383 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Butter + teatop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together703 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread: Forms the base of the dish and provides the body that the butter sits on.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, softening the bread and carrying flavour.

“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.