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Drink

Toast and Water

A simple drink made by steeping a toasted bread slice in boiling water with citrus peel.

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 thick slice of bread.

  2. Brown the bread well without burning it.

Infuse

  1. Pour enough boiling water over the bread.

  2. Add lemon or orange peel.

  3. Cover the jug until it cools down.

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

Thick slice of bread
Browned bread provides toasty, roasted flavor and aroma that dissolves into the water.
Boiling water
Acts as the solvent that extracts flavor from the toasted bread and peel.
Lemon peel or orange peel
Adds bright citrus aroma and oils that lightly flavor the water.

The step that matters

Brown the bread well without burning it. Browning drives Maillard reactions that create the toasty flavor. Burnt bread turns bitter and carries that bitterness into the water.

“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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