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Wine Soup

A soup made from broken bread, sugar, nutmeg, butter, hot water, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Wine Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Break the bread into pieces.

  2. Add sugar, nutmeg, and butter to the bread.

  3. Pour hot water over the mixture.

  4. Stir in the wine.

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 + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Soaks up the hot liquid and gives the soup body and a soft, thick texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, rounding out the flavour of the soup.
Wine
Adds acidity and a fruity, aromatic note to the soup.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the wine and the spice.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sugar, butter, wine):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Garlicfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, butter, wine. 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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