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Drink

Toast and Water

A simple beverage made by soaking toasted stale bread in boiling water, optionally flavored with lemon, orange peel, currant jelly, or apples.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,445 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Toast and Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut a crust of bread from a stale loaf, about twice the thickness of regular toast.

  2. Toast the bread until completely browned, but not burnt.

Make the toast water

  1. Place the toasted bread in a jug and pour boiling water over it to your desired amount.

  2. Cover the jug and let it stand until completely cool.

  3. For added flavor, infuse with lemon, orange peel, currant jelly, or apples.

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 + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Its dry crumb and toasted crust release browned flavour into the water.

The step that matters

Toast the bread until completely browned, but not burnt.. Toasting drives the Maillard browning and caramelisation that give the water its colour and flavour. Burnt bread turns bitter and carries acrid notes into the drink.

“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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