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Dessert

Sippets a LA Reine

Sippets à la Reine is a French dish of soaked bread pieces fried in butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,145 recipes mention both. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the bread into sippets and place them on a dish.

  2. Pour the cream or milk over the bread and let it soak for 1 hour.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the soaked bread in fresh butter until delicately browned.

  2. Drain the sippets and serve them hot.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Bread + buttertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,145 recipes

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together41,494 recipes

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

  3. Bread + creamtop 13% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together5,782 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the base that soaks up the cream and crisps into golden pieces when fried.
Thin cream or milk
Soaks into the bread, keeping the centre moist and tender while the outside browns.
Fresh butter
Fries the bread, adding richness and promoting even browning.

The step that matters

Frying the soaked bread. Soaked bread is fragile and holds a lot of liquid, so it can burn outside while staying soggy inside if the heat is too high. Medium heat lets the butter brown the surface gradually while the interior sets and warms through.

“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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