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Croutons, Genoese Fashion

A dish of toasted stale bread topped with anchovy paste, lettuce, egg salad, olives, capers, and optional beet garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Croutons, Genoese Fashion

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the bread

  1. Cut rounds from stale bread for each person.

  2. Spread lightly with butter and brown in a 400°F (200°C) oven.

  3. Once cooled, spread each round with anchovy paste.

Make the egg salad

  1. Chop hard cooked eggs.

  2. Mix chopped eggs with chopped olives, whole capers, and enough mayonnaise to hold it together.

  3. Add finely chopped red pepper and a few drops of onion juice to the mayonnaise if desired.

Assemble and garnish

  1. Place a heart leaf of lettuce on each round.

  2. Top each with a rounded teaspoon of egg salad.

  3. Garnish with a figure cut from pickled beet or finely chopped pickled beet.

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. Lettuce + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

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

  5. Anchovy + caperstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together473 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Stale bread holds its shape and toasts into a firm, crisp base for the toppings.
Butter
Butter adds richness and helps the bread brown evenly in the oven.
Hard cooked eggs
Chopped egg provides the bulk and soft texture of the salad topping.
Mayonnaise dressing
Mayonnaise binds the chopped egg, olives and capers into a spreadable salad.
Chopped olives
Olives add salty, briny flavour that contrasts with the mild egg.

The step that matters

Let the bread cool before spreading the anchovy paste. Spreading anchovy paste on hot toast makes the paste runny and soaks the bread, so the base turns soft instead of staying crisp.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits about as well
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, anchovy, egg, olive, capers, 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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