Name: Bacon, Fried or Broiled
Ingredients: 10 pieces of bacon; potatoes; 3 pieces of bread

Why it works: Potato and bread work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 434 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Bacon, Fried or Broiled

Ingredients

10 pieces of bacon
potatoes
3 pieces of bread

Directions

Fry or broil the bacon until crispy.
Serve on a small platter with a side of potatoes.
Place 3 pieces of bread on a 5-inch plate.

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.

Potato + breadtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together434 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon: Renders fat and turns crisp, giving the dish its savory flavor and crunch.
Potatoes: Provide starchy bulk that balances the rich, salty bacon.
Bread: Soaks up rendered bacon fat and adds a soft, neutral base.

“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.