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Breakfast

Breakfast

A simple breakfast of weak tea with milk, an egg, and thin bread or toast, optionally served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread 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 ↓

Breakfast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare a cup of weak tea and add milk.

  2. Beat an egg and mix it into the tea or serve it with café au lait.

Serve

  1. Serve with thin bread and butter, toast, or rusk.

  2. Optionally, serve a lightly boiled or poached egg on toast with a small cup of tea filled with cream.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Tea + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together738 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Tea + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together383 recipes

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

  5. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg
Beaten into the tea, it adds richness and body to the drink.
Milk
Softens the tea's bitterness and adds a creamy, mellow flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty mouthfeel to the tea.

“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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