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Dessert

A Friar's Omelet

A baked apple mixture with eggs, butter, sugar, and breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

A Friar's Omelet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the apple mixture

  1. Boil the apples until soft.

  2. Stir in the butter and sugar until combined.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then add the beaten eggs and mix well.

Prepare the dish

  1. Grease a baking dish and coat the bottom and sides with bread crumbs.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the apple mixture into the dish and sprinkle more bread crumbs on top.

  2. Bake until set, then turn out and grate loaf sugar over the 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Apple + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Cooked to a soft pulp that forms the bulk of the dish's body and flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the mixture a smoother, softer texture.
White sugar
Sweetens the mixture and helps the top brown during baking.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set on baking to give it a firm, sliceable structure.
Bread crumbs
Coat the dish and top, helping the surface brown and keeping the mixture from sticking.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the eggs. Adding beaten eggs to a very hot mixture can scramble them, so they will not blend smoothly or set evenly in the bake.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, egg, bread):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, bread. 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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