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Breakfast

Breakfast

A simple breakfast of oatmeal topped with cream, served with bacon or egg, toast, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Breakfast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cook the oatmeal, wheat-meal, or hominy until well-boiled.

  2. Fry the bacon or cook the egg to your preference.

  3. Toast the bread and spread with butter.

Serve

  1. Serve the oatmeal in a bowl with cream on top.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Wheat + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together209 recipes

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

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  5. Wheat + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,002 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Oatmeal
Forms the bulk of the dish, and boiling until soft gives it a creamy, porridge-like texture.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, mild sweetness on top of the oatmeal.
Bacon
Adds savoury, salty flavour and fat, and browns as it fries.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour to the toast.

“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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