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Drink

Crust Coffee

A coffee made by soaking toasted bread in hot milk, with sugar and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Crust Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast the bread slowly until golden brown.

  2. Scrape off any charred portions of the bread.

  3. Place the bread on a soup plate.

Make the coffee

  1. Pour boiling water over the toasted bread and season with sugar and cream.

  2. Pour enough hot milk to wet it through, leaving about ½ inch of milk in the plate.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Bread + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,789 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Bread
Toasted bread soaks up the liquid and gives the drink its characteristic toasty flavour.
Boiling water
Extracts flavour from the toasted bread, making a brown, coffee-like infusion.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the toasted, slightly bitter flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, softening the drink's texture.
Hot milk
Adds creaminess and moisture, wetting the bread through.

The step that matters

Toast the bread slowly until golden brown. Toasting slowly browns the bread evenly through Maillard reactions and caramelisation, building flavour without burning. Fast toasting can char the outside while the inside stays pale, leading to bitter, acrid taste that is hard to fix later.

“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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