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Breakfast Bacon

A dish of fried bacon and sliced potatoes served together.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,668 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Breakfast Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

  1. Soak the slices of salt pork or bacon in milk for 10 minutes.

  2. Roll the soaked slices in flour and fry them until cooked.

Fry and serve

  1. Slice the raw potatoes thinly and fry them in the pork fat.

  2. Serve the fried potatoes on a hot platter with the pork or bacon arranged in a circle around them.

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. Pork + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  2. Milk + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Pork + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 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

Salt pork or bacon
Supplies fat for frying and savoury flavour that the potatoes pick up.
Milk
Softens and mildly cures the pork slices before they are coated and fried.
Flour
Coats the soaked pork so it browns in the fat and keeps a light crust.
Raw potatoes
Form the main starchy base, turning tender and golden when fried thinly in pork fat.

The step that matters

Frying the thin potato slices in pork fat. Thin slices cook through and brown evenly only when the fat is hot enough. If the pan is too cool, the potatoes absorb grease and turn soggy instead of crisp.

“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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