Skip to main content
Breakfast

35 Egg Soup

A soup made with egg yolks, butter, milk, stock, and toasted bread, seasoned with sugar, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

35 Egg Soup

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the bread

  1. Sprinkle both sides of the bread slices with sugar.

  2. Brown the bread in the oven at 400°F (200°C).

Make the soup and serve

  1. Mix the egg yolks and butter with the boiling milk, then add the mixture to the white stock along with pepper, salt, nutmeg, and parsley.

  2. Pour the mixture over the toasted bread and keep hot for 10 minutes before serving.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the soup and add richness as they set gently with heat.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rich mouthfeel and carries flavour.
Stale bread
Soaks up the liquid and holds its shape as a base for the soup.
Milk
Provides liquid and softness, and helps the yolks blend smoothly.
Sugar
Sprinkled on the bread, it promotes browning and adds gentle sweetness.

The step that matters

Adding the yolk mixture to the hot stock. Egg yolks scramble if they meet very hot liquid too quickly. Mixing them with the boiling milk first and adding the mixture gradually to the stock helps them thicken smoothly instead of curdling.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sugar, egg, butter, milk, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Clovefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, egg, butter, milk, pepper, nutmeg. 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.

More egg soup recipes

Balls 5Poached 5Chicken 3Lamb 3 See all 48 →

You might also like

Rice GruelRice Gruel28 recipesPeptoned Milk GruelPeptoned Milk Gruel9 recipes