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Toast Soup

A simple soup made by toasting stale bread, buttering it, breaking it into fragments, and adding boiling water, pepper, and 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 ↓

Toast Soup

Ingredients

Directions

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

  2. While the bread is hot, spread the butter thinly over it.

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

  4. Pour in the boiling water and add the pepper and salt.

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
Provides the base of the soup; toasting it adds browned, toasty flavor.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor as it melts over the hot toast.
Boiling water
Softens the toasted bread and turns it into a broth-like liquid.

The step that matters

Toast until brown but not burnt. Browning through the Maillard reaction builds toasty flavor, while burnt bread turns bitter and acrid, spoiling the soup.

“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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