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Drink

Graham or Brown Bread Brewis

A milk-based drink thickened with Graham or brown bread crumbs, served with butter and brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Graham or Brown Bread Brewis

Ingredients

Directions

Make the porridge

  1. Heat the milk in a double boiler.

  2. Add the butter and salt when the milk is near boiling.

  3. Stir in enough Graham bread crumbs to make a porridge as thick as oatmeal.

  4. Cook for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with whipped butter and brown sugar, or with cream and sugar.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread crumbs swell into a thick porridge.
Graham bread crumbs
Absorb the hot milk and thicken it into a porridge texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the porridge.

The step that matters

Stir in the crumbs gradually. Adding crumbs all at once can clump as they absorb liquid unevenly. Adding them in portions while stirring keeps the porridge smooth and lets it thicken evenly to the desired consistency.

“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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