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Dessert

Buttered Crumbs

Buttered crumbs are buttered stale bread crumbs seasoned 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 bread 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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the crumbs

  1. Grate the crumb part of stale bread.

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

  3. Add the bread crumbs and seasonings to the melted butter; stir with a fork.

Use

  1. 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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  3. 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
Coats the crumbs with fat, adding richness and flavor while keeping them from drying out.
Stale bread crumbs
Provide the body of the mixture, soaking up the melted butter so each crumb is coated.

The step that matters

Melt the butter without browning it. Browning toasts the milk solids in butter, which turns them bitter and dark. Once the butter scorches, that burnt taste carries into every crumb, so keep the heat gentle and watch the pan.

“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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