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White Soup

A creamy soup made from boiled fowl, veal, bread, rice, almonds, stock, sherry, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,769 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

White Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat and bread

  1. Remove skin, fat, and sinews from the fowl and veal.

  2. Pound the fowl, veal, soaked bread, rice, and almonds in a mortar, adding a little veal stock to moisten.

  3. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve into a clean pot.

Make the soup

  1. Boil for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring constantly.

  2. Add sherry and cream, but do not let it boil to avoid curdling.

  3. Season with salt, cayenne, mace, and nutmeg.

  4. Keep the soup hot in a bain-marie until serving.

Serve

  1. Fry bread until golden, cut into dice, and serve with 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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  2. Rice + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Almond + sherrytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together517 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Veal + chickentop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-butanedione (buttery, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Boiled fowl
Provides the main body and savoury flavour of the soup.
Veal cutlet
Adds meaty richness and depth to the soup base.
French rolls
Thicken the soup as soaked bread breaks down into the purée.
Sweet almonds
Add body and a smooth, creamy texture when pounded and sieved.
Heavy cream
Adds fat and a silky, rich mouthfeel to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Adding the cream and sherry. Once the cream is in, the soup must not boil, because high heat can make dairy proteins curdle and separate, leaving the soup grainy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, chicken, rice, almond, sherry, cream, pepper):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, chicken, rice, almond, sherry, cream, pepper. 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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Stock 28Swiss 18Westerfield 14Veal 5Rich 4Plain 3 See all 83 →

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