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Soup Sticks

Bread sticks made from stale bread, buttered and baked until crisp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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 ↓

Soup Sticks

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Cut stale bread into ½-inch slices and remove the crusts.

  2. Spread the slices thinly with butter.

  3. Cut the slices into strips that are ½ inch wide and 2 to 3 inches long.

Bake

  1. Brown the strips in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C).

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 + 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

Stale bread
Its dry, firm crumb lets the strips crisp rather than turn soft in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat that helps the strips brown and gives a rich, savory flavor.

The step that matters

Brown the strips in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C). Thin strips can scorch quickly at high heat. Browning comes from the Maillard reaction, which needs dry surfaces and a watched bake time to turn golden rather than burnt.

“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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