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Bread Soups

Bread soup made by simmering bread in water, then sieving and thinning with water or milk, seasoned with salt, sugar, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Bread Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Make the bread base

  1. Place the bread in a large pot with plenty of water.

  2. Boil steadily for one hour without stirring.

  3. Drain the bread and pass it through a sieve or colander.

  4. Thin the sieved bread with the cooking water.

Season and serve

  1. Season with salt and sugar.

  2. Reheat while stirring.

  3. Thin the sieved bread with boiling milk.

  4. Add a lump of butter just before serving.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the body of the soup as it breaks down into a thick, starchy purée.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the texture when stirred into the purée.

The step that matters

Boil steadily for one hour without stirring. A steady boil softens the bread fully, and stirring can break it up unevenly or make the texture gluey, so the bread should be left undisturbed while it cooks.

“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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