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Breakfast

A Nice Dish for Breakfast

A breakfast dish made by soaking bread in an egg and milk batter and frying it in butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

A Nice Dish for Breakfast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the crusts off the bread slices.

  2. In a bowl, whisk together the eggs and milk to make a batter.

  3. Soak the bread slices in the batter.

Cook

  1. Melt the butter in a frying pan over medium heat.

  2. Fry the soaked bread slices until they are golden brown.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 soaks up the batter to hold its shape while frying.
Eggs
Set when heated, binding the bread and giving the slices a custard-like interior.
Milk
Thins the egg mixture so it soaks into the bread and keeps the inside moist.
Butter
Fat for the pan that promotes browning and adds richness to the crust.

The step that matters

Fry the soaked bread slices until they are golden brown. Frying over medium heat lets the egg set through the center while the surface browns. Too high a heat scorches the outside before the interior cooks, and too low a heat leaves the bread soggy and pale.

“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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