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Royal Breakfast Dish

A skillet dish of bacon and tart apples cooked in bacon fat and sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Royal Breakfast Dish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fry the bacon until crisp.

  2. Peel and quarter the tart apples, leaving some skin on.

Cook the apples

  1. Drop the apples into the hot bacon fat and cover until they begin to soften, turning them carefully once.

  2. Sprinkle sugar over the apples and turn again, leaving the cover off to let them brown.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot platter with the bacon laid across the apples.

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. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon
Supplies crisp pieces and rendered fat that cooks the apples and adds savory flavour.
Tart apples
Soften under covered heat and brown on the surface, providing the main body of the dish.
Sugar
Sprinkled on the apples to caramelise and brown them, adding sweetness.

The step that matters

Covering and uncovering the apples. Covering traps steam so the apples soften through without burning, while removing the lid lets moisture escape so the sugar can caramelise and the surfaces 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.

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