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Potato Soap with Egg and Bread Balls

A potato soup containing boiled bread and egg balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Potato Soap with Egg and Bread Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and chop the potatoes.

  2. Boil the potatoes in water until tender.

  3. Mash the potatoes and season with salt.

Make the bread balls and serve

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs and mix with the bread, forming small balls.

  2. Drop the bread balls into the boiling potato mixture and cook until they float.

  3. Serve 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. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Potato + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together434 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Potato + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,978 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Form the soup's body, thickening it into a starchy, creamy base when mashed.
Eggs
Bind the bread into balls that hold their shape while cooking.
Bread
Provides the body of the dumplings, soaking up egg and absorbing liquid as it cooks.

The step that matters

Dropping the bread balls into the boiling potato mixture. The balls must be firm enough to hold together. If the bread is too wet or the mixture is not boiling, they can fall apart or turn heavy and gummy instead of cooking through and floating.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, bread):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, bread. 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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