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Breakfast

A Southern Breakfast Dish

A skillet dish of chopped ham, cold rice, cayenne pepper, and butter, fried until light brown.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,379 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

A Southern Breakfast Dish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the cooked ham finely.

  2. Mix the chopped ham with cold rice.

  3. Season the mixture with cayenne pepper to taste.

Cook

  1. Melt a good-sized piece of butter in a frying pan.

  2. Add the mixture to the pan.

  3. Fry until light brown.

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. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

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

  2. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

  3. Ham + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Ham + ricetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together477 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. 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

Cooked ham
Provides savory flavor and meaty texture throughout the skillet.
Cold rice
Forms the bulk of the skillet and crisps up as it fries.
Butter
Adds fat that helps the rice and ham brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Fry until light brown. Cold rice is easy to scorch or leave pale if the pan is too hot or too cool, so watch color closely. Browning develops flavor through the Maillard reaction.

“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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