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Parched Flour Soup

A soup made by toasting flour in butter, then adding hot water and seasoning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Parched Flour Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and stir continuously until it turns brown.

  3. Gradually pour in hot water until you reach the desired consistency.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt and additional butter 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Toasting in butter browns the flour, building a nutty flavour and thickening the soup as water is added.
Butter
Fat that carries the toasting of the flour and adds richness to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour until it browns. Flour can scorch quickly over heat. Constant stirring keeps it browning evenly, so it develops a toasted flavour instead of a bitter, burnt taste.

“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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