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Breakfast Stew

A savory stew made with chopped cold meats, soup stock, and spices, served over toasted bread squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Breakfast Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the cold meats finely.

  2. In a pot, combine the chopped meats and soup stock.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and ground cloves.

Cook and serve

  1. Thicken the mixture with browned flour.

  2. Pour the hot stew over the toasted bread squares.

  3. Garnish with slices of lemon and serve immediately.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Clove + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold meats
Provide the main body and savoury flavour of the stew.
Soup stock
Supplies the liquid base that carries the flavour of the stew.
Browned flour
Thickens the stock into a stew by swelling and binding the liquid.
Toasted bread
Absorbs the hot stew and gives it a soft, substantial base.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with browned flour. Flour needs to be cooked into the hot liquid and stirred well, otherwise it clumps and leaves raw floury taste and uneven thickness.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, pepper, clove, flour, bread):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, pepper, clove, flour, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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