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Drink

Toast and Water

A simple drink made by soaking toasted stale bread in boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Toast and Water

Ingredients

Directions

Make the toast

  1. Toast the slice of stale bread until golden brown on both sides, avoiding burning.

Infuse and serve

  1. Place the toasted bread in a jug.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the bread.

  3. Cover the jug closely and let it sit until cold.

  4. Strain the mixture 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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Toasting adds browning and a toasty aroma that flavours the water.
Boiling water
Extracts flavour and aroma from the toasted bread into the liquid.

The step that matters

Toasting the bread until golden, not burnt. Browning creates the toasty flavour compounds that the water extracts. Burnt bread turns bitter and carries that bitterness into the drink.

“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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