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 ↓
Panada
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Break stale bread into bits and place in a stew-pan.
Cover the bread with water and let it soak for 20 minutes.
Cook
Put the stew-pan on the fire and stir with a wooden spoon until it boils.
Add 1 ounce of butter and let it simmer gently for 1 hour.
Finish and serve
Just before serving, add another piece of butter and the yolks of 3 eggs.
Optionally, moisten with broth or milk instead of water.
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.
Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it
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.
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Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together27,232 recipes
Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
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Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together22,662 recipes
Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
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Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together20,964 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together118,967 recipes
Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
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Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together85,593 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Stale bread
- Forms the body of the soup, absorbing liquid and softening into a thick, spoonable texture.
- Egg yolks
- Enrich the soup and thicken it slightly as they are stirred in with the hot liquid.
- Butter
- Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.
The step that matters
Adding the egg yolks just before serving. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat. If the soup is kept at a hard boil after they go in, they can scramble and turn grainy, so they should be stirred in off the boil and served promptly.
“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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