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Breakfast

Food for Young Children: Breakfast

A breakfast menu for young children featuring farina, oatmeal, cocoa, stewed prunes, cornmeal, and fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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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 ↓

Food for Young Children: Breakfast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cereals

  1. Cook farina in milk according to package instructions.

  2. Cook oatmeal in milk until thick.

  3. Cook cornmeal in milk until thick.

  4. Prepare cocoa according to package instructions.

Prepare the fruit and toast

  1. Toast the bread and spread with butter.

  2. Slice the apple and serve with toast.

  3. Prepare apple sauce and serve.

  4. Stew prunes until soft and serve.

  5. Juice the grapefruit for serving.

  6. Grate the yolk of the hard-boiled egg and sprinkle on milk toast.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + cocoatop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together643 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Cooks the farina, oatmeal and cornmeal into soft, thickened porridges.
Oatmeal
Thickens as it cooks in milk, giving the breakfast a hearty, porridge-like texture.
Cornmeal
Thickens as it cooks in milk, giving a firm, porridge-like texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the buttered toast.
Hard-boiled egg
Its grated yolk adds a crumbly, rich topping to the milk toast.

Swap the grapefruit

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, bread, butter, apple, sauce, cocoa, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Grapefits better
  4. Grapefruitthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, butter, apple, sauce, cocoa, egg. 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.

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