Name: Cream Soup
Ingredients: 1 cup bread, cut or broken into pieces; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; 1 teaspoon butter; 1 cup boiling water; 1 tablespoon sweet cream

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 ↓

Cream Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Place the bread pieces in a bowl.
Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and add a little butter.
Pour boiling water over the bread.
Stir in the sweet cream.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Bread + creamtop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5,789 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread: Forms the body of the soup, soaking up the hot water until it turns soft.
Boiling water: Softens the bread and turns it into a warm, spoonable soup.
Sweet cream: Adds richness and fat, giving the soup a smoother, mellower texture.
Butter: Adds fat and a rounded, savory flavor to the bread.

“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.