Skip to main content
Main

Pumpkins — Continued

A baked casserole of sliced pumpkin, bread, broth, and Parmesan cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Pumpkins — Continued

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

  1. Cut the pumpkins into slices.

  2. Season the slices.

  3. Fry the slices in butter.

Assemble

  1. Moisten the bread with broth in a deep dish.

  2. Sift grated Parmesan cheese over the bread.

  3. Layer the fried pumpkin slices and Parmesan cheese alternately.

  4. Top with more slices of bread.

  5. Moisten with broth.

  6. Cover with grated Parmesan cheese.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 15 minutes, basting occasionally.

  2. Serve with a soup tureen full of pot-au-feu broth.

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. Butter + parmesan cheesetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Pumpkin + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together63 recipes

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

  4. Bread + parmesan cheesetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together577 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Pumpkin + parmesan cheesetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together347 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Pumpkin
Forms the main layers and adds soft, sweet body to the dish.
Bread
Soaks up broth and sets into a soft, tender structure between the layers.
Broth
Adds moisture so the bread softens and the layers stay juicy while baking.
Parmesan cheese
Adds savory, salty flavor and helps the top brown as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor when frying the pumpkin and promotes browning on its surface.

Swap the pumpkin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, bread, parmesan cheese):

  1. Plumfits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Pumpkinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, parmesan cheese. 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.

You might also like

Pumpkin BreadPumpkin Bread14 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMacaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes