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Milk and Vegetable Soup

A simple soup made with skim milk, spinach or bread crumbs, onion, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,336 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Milk and Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut the vegetables into small pieces.

  2. In a double boiler, cook the vegetables and bread crumbs in the skim milk.

  3. For larger quantities, use a meat chopper to grind the vegetables and bread crumbs, which will help absorb the juice.

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. Spinach + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + oniontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Milk + spinachtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together914 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Skim milk
Forms the liquid base and keeps the soup moist while the vegetables cook.
Spinach or lettuce leaves
Supplies the vegetable flavour and body of the soup.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and thicken the soup slightly.
Onion
Adds a savoury aroma and background flavour.

The step that matters

Cook in a double boiler. Milk scorches and sticks quickly over direct heat. Gentle indirect heat from a double boiler warms the milk evenly, so the soup stays smooth and does not burn on the base of the pan.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, onion):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, onion. 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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