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Breakfast

Middle Diet

A diet plan that includes bread, beef, broth, tea, milk, porter, gin or wine, and optional egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Middle Diet

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Serve 6 oz of bread with ½ pint of tea for breakfast.

  2. Boil 1 lb of beef (excluding bone).

  3. Serve boiled beef with ½ pint of broth for dinner.

  4. Serve 4 oz of bread with ½ pint of tea for supper.

  5. Add 1 egg as optional extra.

  6. Add ½ pint of new milk as optional extra.

  7. Add ½ pint of porter as optional extra.

  8. Add up to 4 oz of gin or wine as optional extra.

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 + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

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

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main protein; boiling firms its muscle fibres and makes it tender to eat.
Bread
Supplies starch and bulk, giving the meal its substance.
Egg
Adds richness and protein as an optional extra.

“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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