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Breakfast

Breakfast Dish

A simple breakfast dish of sliced cheese, sweet milk, mustard, and crushed crackers, cooked in a pan.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Breakfast Dish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut the fresh cheese into thin slices and place in a frying pan.

  2. Pour the sweet milk over the cheese.

  3. Add the dry mustard, salt, pepper, and butter.

  4. Crush the Boston crackers finely and sprinkle them in gradually.

  5. Turn the mixture into a warm dish and serve immediately.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  3. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Cheese + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

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

  5. Cheese + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,805 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh cheese
Melts into the milk to form the soft, creamy body of the dish.
Sweet milk
Provides the liquid that melts the cheese into a smooth, pourable mixture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a silkier texture in the finished mixture.
Boston crackers
Crushed crackers thicken the mixture as they absorb liquid and soften.

The step that matters

Sprinkling in the crushed crackers. Adding crackers all at once can clump and thicken the mixture unevenly. Adding them gradually while stirring lets starch absorb liquid evenly, giving a smoother texture.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, milk, pepper, egg, butter):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, milk, pepper, egg, butter. 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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