Name: Bread Soup
Ingredients: stale bread; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; boiling water; 1 tablespoon sweet cream

Why it works: Bread and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,789 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Bread Soup

Ingredients

stale bread
¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt
boiling water
1 tablespoon sweet cream

Directions

Break the stale bread into pieces.
Place the bread in a dish and add the coarse sea salt.
Pour boiling water over the bread.
Season with sweet cream.

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 + creamtop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5,789 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

Stale bread: Forms the body of the soup and soaks up the hot water to become soft.
Sweet cream: Adds richness and fat, softening the flavor and giving a smoother mouthfeel.

“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.