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Toast Soup

A simple soup made by toasting stale bread, buttering it, and steeping it in boiling water with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Toast Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Toast the slice of stale wheat bread until brown throughout, being careful not to burn it.

  2. While still hot, spread 2 teaspoons of butter over the bread, allowing it to soak in.

  3. Break the bread into fragments and place them in a pitcher.

Make the soup

  1. Pour 2 cups of boiling water over the bread pieces.

  2. Add salt and pepper to taste.

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).

  2. Wheat + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together209 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Wheat + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,002 recipes

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

  4. Wheat + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together984 recipes

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

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 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 wheat bread
Provides the main body and toasted flavour of the soup once steeped in water.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour into the toasted bread.

The step that matters

Toasting the bread until brown throughout. Browning the bread develops toasty flavour through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation. Pale or burnt bread gives a flat or bitter soup, so the toast should be even and not scorched.

“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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