Skip to main content
Main

Bread Omelet

A savory dish made by baking a mixture of crumbled bread, egg, onion, parsley, and seasonings in fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Bread Omelet

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Bread Omelet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Soften the hard bread in hot water or milk, or in cold water and crumble it.

Make the mixture

  1. In a bowl, combine the softened bread, chopped onion, parsley, egg, salt, and pepper.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat bits of suet or beef fat in a frying pan or square baking pan.

  2. Pour the mixture into the pan, cover, and bake for five minutes.

  3. Uncover and brown the top, or cook slowly on the stove.

  4. Cut into pieces and serve around meat or with gravy.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard bread
Forms the body of the omelet once softened and bound with egg.
Egg
Binds the bread and herbs together and sets to hold the mixture in shape.
Suet or beef fat
Fries the underside and adds richness and flavor to the crust.
Onion
Adds savory aroma and flavor to the bread mixture.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, parsley, egg, pepper, beef):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, parsley, egg, pepper, beef. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes