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Breakfast

Breakfast Dishes

A fried rice and egg breakfast with butter, mustard, cayenne sauce, and bread triangles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Breakfast Dishes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt and brown the butter in a frying pan.

  2. Add the rice, minced eggs, salt, dry mustard, and cayenne sauce to the pan, then heat thoroughly while stirring constantly with a fork.

  3. Serve hot with the bread triangles arranged around the dish, garnished with parsley and sprinkled with the vermicellied yolks of eggs.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Mustard + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,588 recipes

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

  3. Rice + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together599 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Rice + parsleytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,762 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Rice + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Browning in the pan adds a nutty, toasted flavour and richness to the dish.
Cooked rice
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs the butter and seasonings.
Hard boiled eggs
Add body and a savoury, creamy texture when minced into the hot mixture.
Cayenne sauce
Adds heat and a sharp, peppery bite that cuts through the richness.

The step that matters

Browning the butter. Butter that is browned too little lacks nutty flavour, while butter that burns turns bitter and dark. Watch the milk solids turn golden and remove it from the heat promptly.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, egg, butter, sauce, bread, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, egg, butter, sauce, bread, parsley. 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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