Name: Thin Bread and Butter
Ingredients: 1 loaf of bread; butter

Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Thin Bread and Butter

Ingredients

1 loaf of bread
butter

Directions

Cut off the end crust from the loaf of bread.
Butter the loaf of bread evenly.
Slice the bread very thinly with a sharp knife.
Continue buttering the bread until the plate is full.
Continue slicing the bread until the plate is full.
Cut down through the middle of the slices, serving each with a half slice.

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 + buttertop 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

Bread: Forms the body of the dish and holds the butter in each slice.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, softening the bread and carrying its flavour.

“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.