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Dessert

Buttered Crumbs

Butter and breadcrumbs mixed with salt and pepper, used as a topping for scalloped dishes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Buttered Crumbs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grate stale bread to make breadcrumbs.

  2. Melt the butter in a pan without letting it brown.

Make the mixture

  1. Add the breadcrumbs, salt, and pepper; stir with a fork.

  2. Use the mixture for scalloped dishes.

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. Butter + peppertop 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the crumbs so they stay tender and carry flavor.
Breadcrumbs
Provide the bulk of the mixture, soaking up melted butter to form a loose, crumbly topping.

The step that matters

Melt the butter without browning it. Butter browns quickly once its water has evaporated and milk solids toast. Browned butter tastes nutty and darker than intended, and it can scorch, changing the flavor of the whole mixture.

“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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