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Drink

Crust Coffee

A beverage made by pouring boiling water over toasted bread, then strained and sweetened with cream and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar 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

  1. Pour boiling water over pieces of very brown toasted bread.

  2. Strain the mixture for use.

  3. Add cream and sugar to taste.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

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

  3. 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

Pieces of toasted bread
Provides the roasted, toasty flavour and colour that define the drink.
Boiling water
Extracts flavour from the toasted bread into a brewed liquid.
Cream
Adds richness and a softer, rounder mouthfeel to the drink.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the bitter, roasted notes.

The step that matters

Toasting the bread very brown. Browning drives the Maillard reaction and caramelisation, which create the deep roasted flavour. Pale toast gives a weak, flat drink, so the bread should be dark brown before it is steeped.

“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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