Name: Bacon
Ingredients: 4 pounds bacon; fine bread crumbs; brown sugar

Why it works: Bread and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,638 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Bacon

Ingredients

4 pounds bacon
fine bread crumbs
brown sugar

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Boil the bacon for three hours.
Remove the skin from the cooked bacon.

Brown and serve

Sprinkle the top with fine bread crumbs and a little brown sugar.
Brown the bacon in the oven at 350°F (175°C).

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.

Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,638 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

Bacon: Provides the main meat and fat that flavours the dish.
Fine bread crumbs: Form a crisp, browned crust on the surface as they toast.
Brown sugar: Adds sweetness and helps the top caramelise and brown.

“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.