Name: Bread and Milk
Ingredients: 2 cups fresh whole or skim milk; 2 cups dried black bread or crusts; ¼ teaspoon salt

Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Bread and Milk

Ingredients

2 cups fresh whole or skim milk
2 cups dried black bread or crusts
¼ teaspoon salt

Directions

Bring the milk to a boil.
Pour the hot milk over the dried black bread or crusts.
Add salt and let it stand for 10 minutes.
Serve in soup plates.

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.

Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,466 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk: Provides the liquid that softens the bread into a soupy texture.
Dried black bread or crusts: Absorbs the hot milk and swells, giving the soup its body and bready flavor.

“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.