Name: Cheese Soup
Ingredients: 4 slices of bread; 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese; 4 cups boiling brown stock

Why it works: Bread and parmesan cheese work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 577 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Cheese Soup

Ingredients

4 slices of bread
1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
4 cups boiling brown stock

Directions

Cut the bread into small squares and place them in the bottom of a soup tureen.
Grate a thick layer of Parmesan cheese over the bread.
Pour 4 cups of boiling brown stock over the cheese and bread.

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.

Bread + parmesan cheesetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together577 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 stock and forms a soft, substantial base for the soup.
Parmesan cheese: Melts into the hot stock, adding savory flavor and a rich, stringy body.
Brown stock: Provides the liquid and most of the savory flavor, softening the bread as it soaks.

“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.