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Spring Soup

A mutton broth soup with flour, milk, egg, parsley, mint, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Spring Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Make broth from a mutton bone with pepper, salt, and 2-3 celery stalks.

  2. Strain 1½ pints of broth.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix in flour rubbed smooth in ¼ cup milk, beaten egg, and 1 cup milk.

  2. Cook mixture in broth briefly.

  3. Add parsley, mint, and lemon slices.

  4. Serve very hot.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Mint + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,998 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Parsley + minttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,198 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the broth as it cooks, giving the soup body.
Egg
Enriches the soup and adds body as it cooks into the broth.
Milk
Adds richness and softness, mellowing the broth's flavour.
Mutton broth
Forms the savoury base that carries every other flavour.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture in broth briefly. Egg proteins set when heated, so the mixture must be stirred in gently and kept below a hard boil. Boiling hard can curdle the egg and leave the soup grainy.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, flour, milk, egg, pepper, parsley, lemon):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, flour, milk, egg, pepper, parsley, lemon. 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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