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Toast-soup

A simple soup made by soaking toasted stale wheat bread in hot water with butter, salt, and pepper.

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 ↓

Toast-soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast the slice of stale wheat bread until brown, but do not burn it.

  2. While still hot, spread a thin layer of butter on the bread.

  3. Break the buttered bread into fragments and place them in a pitcher.

Make the soup

  1. Pour in slightly more than 2 cups of boiling water.

  2. Add salt and pepper 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Wheat + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together209 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Wheat + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Wheat + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together984 recipes

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

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 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

Stale wheat bread
Forms the body of the soup, soaking up the water and becoming soft and thick.
Butter
Adds richness and a fat-based flavor that carries through the broth.
Boiling water
Softens the bread and turns it into a warm, brothy liquid.

The step that matters

Toasting the bread. Toasting until brown adds roasted, savory flavor through browning, but burnt bread turns bitter and acrid, so it should be stopped just short of burning.

“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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