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Potage Livonien Aux Kloskis

A green soup of sorrel, spinach, beet leaves, cucumbers, and dumplings made from bread, eggs, and ham.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and sorrel share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 38 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potage Livonien Aux Kloskis

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the kliskis

  1. Make a dry paste from the soaked bread, adding eggs and salt to form a light choux pastry.

  2. Sauté the shallot in butter, then add the diced ham to the shallot.

  3. Fry the croutons in clarified butter until golden.

  4. Mix the shallot, ham, and fried croutons into the choux pastry.

  5. Using a teaspoon, drop portions of the mixture into lightly salted boiling water.

  6. Cook the dumplings for 15 minutes.

  7. Drain the dumplings.

Make the soup

  1. Prepare a cream spinach soup according to your preferred method.

  2. Melt the sorrel and strain it.

  3. Melt the spinach and beet leaves and strain them.

  4. Combine the strained greens with diced cucumbers and add the desired amount of kislischy or a bit of slightly sparkling white wine.

  5. Add the dumplings to the soup after thickening it with double cream and fine butter.

  6. Season the soup with salt, sugar, and chopped herbs.

  7. Just before serving, add clean ice cubes to the soup.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Shallot + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together38 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Bread + hamtop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together2,536 recipes

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

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together41,516 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the bread paste and give the kliskis a light, airy choux-like structure.
Soaked bread
Provides body to the dumpling paste once squeezed dry and worked with eggs.
Double cream
Thickens the soup and adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Sorrel
Contributes a bright, sharp acidity that gives the soup its characteristic tang.
Spinach
Forms the green base of the soup and adds body and earthy flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour when sautéing and frying, and enriches the soup.

The step that matters

Drop the dumpling mixture into gently boiling salted water. If the water is not boiling, or the paste is too wet, the kliskis may fall apart or turn heavy. A dry, well-formed paste holds its shape while the eggs set in the hot water.

Flavor stand-ins for the sorrel

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, egg, butter, shallot, ham, cream):

  1. Nutmegabout as good a flavor fit
  2. Capersabout as good a flavor fit
  3. Sorrelthe original
  4. Parsleyabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, butter, shallot, ham, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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