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Bread

Bread Soup

Bread Soup is a dish made by boiling stale bread in salted water with butter, then adding egg yolks and fresh butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Bread Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Place the cut bread into cold water and bring to a boil with salt and butter.

  2. Boil slowly for 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. In a tureen, combine the egg yolks with the fresh butter.

  2. Pour the boiled bread mixture into the tureen, stirring continuously.

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

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

  3. 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

Stale bread
Breaks down while simmering to thicken the soup and give it body.
Egg yolks
Enrich the soup and thicken it slightly when stirred into the hot liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the bread into the egg yolk and butter mixture. Pouring the hot bread mixture in while stirring constantly gently warms the yolks so they blend smoothly. Without constant stirring, the yolks can scramble and leave lumps.

“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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