Name: Croutons Frits Pour Potage
Ingredients: slices of bread from a tin-loaf; hot fat or butter

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 ↓

Croutons Frits Pour Potage

Ingredients

slices of bread from a tin-loaf
hot fat or butter

Directions

Cut the crust off the bread and slice it into ½-inch squares.
Fry the squares in hot fat or butter until golden brown.
Drain well and serve separately from the soup.

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

Slices of bread from a tin-loaf: Provides the base that fries into crisp, golden croutons.
Hot fat or butter: Conducts heat to crisp the surface and adds browning and rich flavour.

“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.