Name: Buttered Crumbs for Scalloped Dishes
Ingredients: 1 cup crumbs from stale bread; 3 teaspoons salt; Pepper or cayenne to taste; 1 tablespoon butter

Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Buttered Crumbs for Scalloped Dishes

Ingredients

1 cup crumbs from stale bread
3 teaspoons salt
Pepper or cayenne to taste
1 tablespoon butter

Directions

Prepare crumbs by grating stale bread or rubbing two pieces together.
Melt the butter in a pan.
Add the crumbs and salt to the melted butter.
Mix well with a fork and season with pepper or cayenne if desired.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread crumbs: Form the base of the dish; stale bread is drier, so the crumbs toast and absorb butter evenly.
Butter: Coats the crumbs with fat, carrying flavour and helping them brown lightly and stay crisp.

“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.