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Cracker Panada

A simple soup made by soaking Boston crackers in boiling water with sugar, salt, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23,364 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Cracker Panada

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Split the crackers and layer them in a bowl.

  2. Sprinkle salt and sugar between the layers.

Soak and serve

  1. Cover the crackers with boiling water.

  2. Set the bowl on the hearth with a close top for at least 1 hour.

  3. Serve from the bowl with additional sugar sprinkled on top.

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. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Boston crackers
Provide the bread base that softens into a porridge-like texture when soaked.
White sugar
Adds sweetness, balancing the salty flavor of the crackers and salt.
Boiling water
Softens the crackers and turns them into a soupy, spoonable mass.

The step that matters

Covering the bowl while the crackers soak. Keeping a close top over the bowl holds in heat and moisture, so the crackers soften evenly through the full hour rather than drying at the surface.

“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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