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Breakfast

East India Breakfast Dish

A breakfast dish of rice cooked with codfish, eggs, butter, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,379 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

East India Breakfast Dish

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Boil the rice in water for 25 minutes, then drain.

  2. Return the rice to the saucepan and add butter, salt, and cayenne pepper.

Prepare the codfish and serve

  1. Remove skin and bones from the salt codfish and heat it in a pan until very hot.

  2. Take the codfish off the heat and stir in the beaten eggs.

  3. Serve immediately.

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. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

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

  2. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Rice + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,350 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the bulk of the dish, giving a soft, starchy base that absorbs the butter and seasoning.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the rice and carrying flavour.
Salt codfish
Provides the main savoury flavour and protein, flaked into the dish.
Eggs
Set with the residual heat of the fish, binding the mixture and adding richness.

The step that matters

Stir in the beaten eggs off the heat. Eggs set when heated, so removing the pan from the heat before adding them lets them thicken gently into a creamy texture rather than scrambling into curds.

“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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