Skip to main content
Drink

Toast and Water

A beverage made by steeping toasted stale bread in boiling and then cold water, optionally flavored with lemon, orange peel, currant jelly, or roasted apples.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 the toast

  1. Cut a crust of stale bread about twice the thickness of regular toast.

  2. Toast the bread until completely browned but not burnt.

Steep and strain

  1. Pour boiling water into a jug, enough to make your desired drink.

  2. Add the toasted bread to the jug and let it stand until cold.

  3. For a quicker method, place the bread in a mug, cover with boiling water, and let it cool.

  4. Once cooled, fill the mug with cold spring water and strain through a fine sieve.

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

Stale bread
Toasted bread provides the main flavour, colour and body of the drink.

The step that matters

Toasting the bread until completely browned but not burnt. Browning through toasting develops roasted, nutty flavours that carry into the water. Burnt bread turns bitter and sharp, which the drink will taste of.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes