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Kitchiner's Cheap Soup

A hearty soup made with butter, carrots, onions, giblets, livers, and seasonings, finished with wine and citrus.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 27 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Kitchiner's Cheap Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Combine butter, chopped carrots, sliced onions, and shallots in a stew pan. Cook over low heat for a few minutes to draw out the flavors.

  2. Add enough water or broth to cover the mixture and simmer for at least 2 hours.

  3. Optionally add rice or barley to thicken the soup.

Prepare the giblets and liver balls

  1. Prepare the giblets by simmering them in good gravy until tender, along with a spice bag containing onions, herbs, allspice, and black pepper.

  2. Once the giblets are tender, remove them and thicken the gravy with butter and flour.

  3. Chop the cooked livers finely and mix with butter, hard-boiled egg yolks, seasonings, and bread crumbs. Form into small balls.

  4. Add the balls to the boiling soup and simmer for 15 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Season with salt, pepper, and ketchup before serving.

  2. Finish by adding wine and the juice of the orange or lemon, then return the giblets to warm through 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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Clove + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the base and carries flavor when cooking the vegetables and liver mixture.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Bind the chopped liver mixture so it holds together as balls.
Bread crumbs
Add body to the liver balls and help them hold their shape.
Flour
Thickens the gravy with butter into a smoother body.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the soup base.

The step that matters

Forming and simmering the liver balls. The chopped liver mixture must be bound firmly so the balls keep their shape; if it is too loose they can break apart in the simmering soup, and cooking them gently keeps the liver tender rather than tough.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, carrot, clove, shallot, pepper, ketchup, rice):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, clove, shallot, pepper, ketchup, rice. 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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