Name: Harl>-brea1> Toast Water
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons powdered hard-bread; 1 pint boiling water; ½ teaspoon salt; optional flavorings: sugar, condensed milk, or whisky

Why it works: Bread and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,638 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Harl>-brea1> Toast Water

Ingredients

2 tablespoons powdered hard-bread
1 pint boiling water
½ teaspoon salt
optional flavorings: sugar, condensed milk, or whisky

Directions

Prepare

Toast or parch the powdered hard-bread in an oven.
Add the toasted hard-bread to the boiling water with salt.
Boil for 10 minutes.

Strain and serve

Strain through gauze and serve hot or cold.
Flavor with sugar, condensed milk, or whisky if desired.

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 + sugartop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,638 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard bread: Toasting and boiling release its roasted, toasty flavor and starch into the water, giving the drink body and aroma.
Salt: Seasons the water and sharpens the toasted flavor.

“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.