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Bread Fitters

Bread Fitters are fried bread sandwiches dipped in a milk, egg, and flour batter and served with jam and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Bread Fitters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, mix the milk, egg, and flour to create a batter.

  2. Cut the bread into thin squares or triangles.

  3. Spread half of the bread pieces with jam and top with the remaining pieces.

Fry and serve

  1. Dip the sandwiches into the batter.

  2. Fry in boiling lard until golden brown.

  3. Serve hot, sprinkled with white sugar.

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. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour 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

Flour
Forms the batter with the milk and egg, thickening it so it coats the bread.
Egg
Binds the batter and helps it set and brown when fried.
Milk
Makes up the liquid of the batter, moistening the bread and softening its interior.
Bread
Forms the outer shell and soaks up the batter so the sandwich becomes tender inside.

The step that matters

Frying in boiling lard. The lard must be hot enough to set the batter quickly and form a crisp golden crust. If the fat is too cool, the sandwiches absorb more grease and turn soggy.

“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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