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Drink

Cracker Panada

A drink made by boiling crackers in water, then seasoning with sugar, salt, nutmeg or wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23,364 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Cracker Panada

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Break the crackers into pieces and brown them in the oven at 400°F (200°C).

Make the panada

  1. Boil the browned crackers in 2 cups of water for 15 minutes.

  2. Let it stand for a few minutes, then strain the mixture.

  3. Season with sugar and salt, and flavor with nutmeg or a little wine.

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. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Crackers
Provide the starch and body that thicken the water into a soft, porridge-like panada.
Water
Hydrates and cooks the browned crackers, letting their starch swell and dissolve.

The step that matters

Browning the crackers in the oven. Browning adds toasted, roasted flavour that plain crackers lack. Under-browned crackers taste flat, while over-browned ones turn bitter.

“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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