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Bread

A Nice Breakfast Dish

A fried bread dish made by coating stale bread in an egg and corn starch batter and cooking in lard and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

A Nice Breakfast Dish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Cut stale bread into slices.

  2. In a bowl, mix corn starch with milk for each egg.

  3. Add eggs and a pinch of salt to the mixture, whisk until smooth.

  4. Dip bread slices into the batter, coating well.

Fry

  1. Heat lard and butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Fry the coated bread until golden brown on both sides.

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).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set in the heat to bind the coating and give the slices structure.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk mixture so the batter clings to the bread and crisps when fried.
Milk
Loosens the egg and starch into a batter that coats the bread evenly.
Stale bread
Drier bread soaks up the batter without falling apart in the pan.
Butter
Adds richness and aroma and helps the surface brown.

The step that matters

Fry the coated bread until golden brown on both sides. Medium heat lets the egg coating set and the sugars and proteins brown before the inside dries out. Too high a heat burns the outside while the center stays raw.

“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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