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Egg Soup

A soup made from stale bread, butter, an egg, water, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Egg Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Crumb stale bread until you have the desired amount.

  2. Brown the bread in plenty of butter, stirring continually.

Add the egg

  1. Bake 1 egg over the browned bread.

  2. Stir for a short time.

  3. Remove the mixture into a tureen.

Add the broth and serve

  1. Pour water into the pan.

  2. Add salt.

  3. Bring to a boil.

  4. Pour the boiling water over the bread to cover it.

  5. Serve immediately.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the body of the soup, soaking up the broth and giving it substance.
Butter
Browns the bread, adding fat and a toasted, nutty flavour.
Egg
Cooks into the bread, adding richness and binding the mixture together.

The step that matters

Brown the bread in plenty of butter, stirring continually. Constant stirring and enough fat let the crumbs colour evenly. Uneven or burnt spots taste bitter and spoil the soup's flavour.

“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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