Name: 53 Cracknels
Ingredients: cracknels; ½ cup warm water; 1 cup bread crumbs or cold corn bread, broken fine; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Bread and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,964 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

53 Cracknels

Ingredients

Directions

Place cracknels in a pan with warm water.
Add bread crumbs or broken corn bread.
Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.
Fry until golden brown.
Serve hot.

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.

Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cracknels: Form the base of the dish, soaking up the warm water to soften.
Bread crumbs or cold corn bread: Add body and bulk, giving the mixture a tender, starchy texture.

“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.