Name: Bread Soup
Ingredients: pieces of bread-crust; 1 quart water; 1 tablespoon butter; salt to taste

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 Soup

Ingredients

pieces of bread-crust
1 quart water
1 tablespoon butter
salt to taste

Directions

Boil the bread crust pieces in 1 quart of water with 1 tablespoon of butter.
Beat the mixture with a spoon until the bread and water are well mixed.
Keep boiling until fully combined, then add salt to taste.

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.

Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crust: Softens in the boiling water and gives the soup its body and bread flavour.
Butter: Adds richness and fat, rounding out the flavour of the broth.

“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.