Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Egg and Bread Crumb
Ingredients
Directions
The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.
Prepare the crumbs
Lay stale bread on a cloth and break it into crumbs using the corners of the cloth.
Pass the crumbs through a wire sieve.
Dry the crumbs before the fire or in a 300°F (150°C) oven, being careful not to brown them.
Make the egg mixture
In a flat dish, beat the eggs with salad oil, water, pepper, and salt until well combined.
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.
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Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together22,662 recipes
Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
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Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together20,964 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together50,580 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Eggs
- Bind the mixture and set to coat the crumbs, giving structure to the coating.
- Stale bread crumbs
- Form the coating itself, providing the crisp, absorbent layer that the egg holds.
- Salad oil
- Adds fat, keeping the coating tender and helping it brown evenly.
The step that matters
Dry the crumbs without browning them. Crumbs dried at too high a heat or for too long will brown or toast, changing the flavour and colour of the coating before it is used. Gentle drying keeps them pale and evenly dry.
“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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