Name: Bacon on Toast
Ingredients: thin slices of bacon; butter; bread

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 ↓

Bacon on Toast

Ingredients

thin slices of bacon
butter
bread

Directions

Toast or fry the bacon slices until crisp.
Drain the bacon from the fat.
Serve the bacon on thinly buttered toast.

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.

Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon: Provides savoury, salty flavour and crisp texture when cooked until crisp.
Butter: Adds richness and moisture to the toast and helps the bacon sit on it.
Bread: Forms the crisp, absorbent base that carries the bacon and butter.

“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.