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Fried Bread, or Sippets of Bread for Oarnishino

Fried slices of stale bread served as garnish with a lemon, salt, and cayenne pepper sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fried Bread, or Sippets of Bread for Oarnishino

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Cut the stale bread into slices a quarter-inch thick and shape them into diamonds or other desired shapes.

  2. Fry the shaped bread in fresh butter until pale brown and deeper brown, then dry them well.

Assemble and make the sauce

  1. Arrange the fried bread around the dish to be garnished, using a mixture of flour and egg white to help them adhere if needed.

  2. Juice the lemons and strain it until clear, then add salt, cayenne pepper, and thin strips of lemon rind.

  3. Simmer the sauce for 3-4 minutes, then cool and strain again before bottling.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Stale bread
Forms the crisp fried shapes that serve as the garnish.
Fresh butter
Fries the bread, adding fat for golden browning and rich flavour.
Flour and egg white
Binds the mixture that helps the fried bread stick to the dish.
Lemons
Provide acidity and aroma for the sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the bread until deeply browned. Butter browns through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation, which gives flavour and colour, but it can burn quickly. Dark spots taste bitter, so the bread should be watched closely and removed once golden brown.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, flour, egg, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Plumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, flour, egg, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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