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Bread

Potage Au Panade

A French bread soup made with buttered bread, water, salt, egg yolks, cream, and optional sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Potage Au Panade

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine thin slices of bread and butter with enough water to soak them in a stewpan.

  2. Add salt and let the mixture stew for about 45 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the yolks of 3-4 eggs with cream to create a liaison.

  2. When the soup is boiling, pour in the liaison and remove from heat.

  3. Serve immediately.

  4. For children, substitute sugar for 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Soaks up water and softens into the body of the soup.
Egg yolks
Thicken the soup and give it a rich, smooth texture when heated gently.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, softening the flavour and smoothing the liaison.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour as the bread stews.

The step that matters

Adding the liaison. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble if the soup is too hot or boils after they go in. Remove from heat promptly after pouring the liaison in to keep the soup smooth.

“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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