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Pain Rôti À LA Minime

A toasted bread dish topped with anchovy slips and a garlic‑parsley oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Pain Rôti À LA Minime

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast

  1. Cut the bread into pieces the length of two fingers and thickness of two coins.

  2. Fry the bread in oil until golden brown.

  3. Arrange anchovy slips over the toasted bread in a dish.

Make the dressing and serve

  1. In the same oil, add shallots, parsley, garlic, bay leaf, thyme, whole pepper, and vinegar.

  2. Boil the mixture for 1-2 minutes, then strain it over the toast.

  3. Serve cold.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Fried slices form a crisp, golden base that holds the anchovies and dressing.
Anchovy slips
Provide salty, savoury flavour that stands out against the sweet and sharp dressing.
Shallots or green onions
Add mild sweetness and aromatic onion flavour to the boiled dressing.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that mellows and infuses the oil when gently cooked.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and balances the salty anchovies.

The step that matters

Boiling the oil mixture and straining it over the toast. Boiling for only 1-2 minutes extracts aroma from the aromatics without burning the garlic and herbs, and the hot oil-vinegar mixture softens the toast so it absorbs the flavour.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, anchovy, shallot, parsley, garlic, thyme, pepper):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, anchovy, shallot, parsley, garlic, thyme, 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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