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Fried Bread for Garnishing

Fried bread pieces used as garnish, made by frying stale bread in butter and coating with flour and egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Fried Bread for Garnishing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Slice stale bread into ¼-inch thick pieces.

  2. Cut the slices into diamond shapes or use a paste cutter for other shapes.

Fry and dry

  1. Fry the shapes in fresh butter until some are light brown and others are darker.

  2. Dry the fried bread well.

Garnish and serve

  1. Arrange them around the dish for garnishing.

  2. To make them stick to the edge of the dish, brush the edge with a little flour and egg white, and let it dry before serving.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Stale bread
Its dry, firm crumb fries into crisp shapes that hold their form.
Fresh butter
Frying in butter browns the bread and adds richness and flavour.
Flour
A light dusting helps the egg white grip the dish edge.
Egg white
Its proteins dry into a thin film that makes the bread stick to the edge.

The step that matters

Fry until evenly coloured and dry the bread well. Bread fries quickly and can go from pale to burnt in moments, so uneven colour can result. Thorough drying removes surface moisture so the pieces stay crisp rather than soggy once plated.

“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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