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Drink

Toast Water

A beverage made by soaking stale bread in boiling water, sweetened with sugar and flavored with nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Toast Water

Why it works: Bread and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,997 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Toast Water

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Toast the slice of stale bread until it is brown.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the toast in a large bowl.

  3. Sweeten the mixture to taste and add a pinch of nutmeg.

  4. Cover the bowl and let it cool.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  3. Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

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

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

Stale bread
Toasting browns the bread, and its toasted flavor passes into the water.
Boiling water
Extracts flavor from the toast and forms the drink's liquid base.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the toasted flavor.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Gingerfits less well
  4. Clovefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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