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 ↓
Cherry Soup
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Remove the stems from the cherries.
Slice the bread.
Cook
Stew the cherries for a few minutes until heated but not broken.
Fry the bread in butter until brown.
Serve
Place the fried bread in a deep dish.
Pour the stewed cherries over it.
Serve hot.
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.
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Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together27,232 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
- Cherries
- Provide the main fruit flavour and juice that soaks into the bread.
- Bread
- Forms a soft base that absorbs the cherry liquid.
- Butter
- Adds fat and browning to the bread as it fries.
The step that matters
Stew the cherries until heated but not broken. Gentle heat for a few minutes warms the fruit and softens it while keeping its shape. Overcooking breaks down the cell walls, turning the cherries mushy and the soup cloudy.
“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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