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Dessert

Fried Bread-crumbs

Fried bread crumbs are made by grating stale bread, browning the crumbs in butter, and drying them.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 ↓

Fried Bread-crumbs

Oven, in the book's wordsA gentle oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crumbs

  1. Grate the stale bread into very fine crumbs and shake them through a colander without touching them with your hands.

Fry the crumbs

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

  2. Add the crumbs to the pan and stir constantly until they turn a clear gold color.

  3. Remove the crumbs with a skimmer and spread them on a soft cloth laid on a reversed sieve to dry before the fire.

Alternative method

  1. For a more delicate preparation, brown the crumbs in a gentle oven without adding butter.

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).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Dry, firm crumb that toasts into crisp, lightly golden crumbs rather than soggy ones.
Butter
Fat that carries heat evenly, browns the crumbs and adds rich flavor.

The step that matters

Stir constantly while frying the crumbs. Crumbs are small and have a lot of surface area, so they brown quickly and can scorch within moments. Constant stirring keeps the heat even so they reach an even gold rather than burnt patches.

“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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