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Bacon, Broiled or Fried

Bacon slices are thinly sliced and either broiled or fried, served with a gravy made from lard, flour, milk, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bacon, Broiled or Fried

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Broil or fry

  1. Slice the bacon as thin as possible.

  2. Lay the bacon in a shallow tin and place it in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C).

  3. Toast until the slices curl and become dry enough to eat with fingers.

  4. Alternatively, fry the bacon in a hot skillet, turning it twice until slightly browned on both sides.

Make the gravy

  1. Thicken the lard that exudes with flour, add sweet milk and black pepper.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26,984 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Provides the meat and fat that cook out and flavour the dish.
Flour
Thickens the rendered lard into a smooth gravy.
Sweet milk
Adds liquid and body to the thickened lard, making a creamy gravy.

The step that matters

Thicken the lard that exudes with flour. Flour must be stirred into the hot rendered fat before liquid is added so that starch grains coat and separate, then thicken smoothly when the milk is added, avoiding lumps.

“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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