Name: A Delicate Potage
Ingredients: 1 slice of white bread; 4 eggs; 4 tablespoons olive oil

Why it works: Bread and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and 999 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

1 slice of white bread
4 eggs
4 tablespoons olive oil

Directions

Cut the white bread into small dice and place it in a tureen.
Beat the eggs separately, then mix the yolks with the olive oil.
Pour the egg and oil mixture over the bread in the tureen.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Bread + olivetop 4% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together999 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Bread + eggtop 6% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together22,584 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Egg + olivetop 20% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together12,307 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-heptenal (green).

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

What each ingredient does

White bread: Forms the body of the soup and soaks up the egg and oil mixture.
Eggs: Add richness and help bind the bread into a soft, custardy texture.
Olive oil: Adds fat for richness and carries flavour through the eggs and bread.

“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.