Skip to main content
Drink

Crust Coffee

A beverage made by steeping toasted bread in boiling water, optionally with milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Crust Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast the bread until very brown and break it into small pieces.

  2. Place half a pint of the bread pieces into a pitcher.

Brew and serve

  1. Pour 1½ pints of boiling water over the bread pieces.

  2. Cover the pitcher and let it stand for 10 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture and serve hot or cold.

  4. Add a little milk if desired, or use boiling hot milk instead of water.

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 + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Toasting browns the bread, giving the drink its roasted, coffee-like flavour.
Boiling water
Extracts flavour and colour from the toasted bread pieces as it steeps.

The step that matters

Toast the bread until very brown. Browning develops roasted flavour through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation. Pale toast gives a weak, bland drink, so the colour is the cue to watch.

“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.

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes