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Cherry Soup

A cherry soup served with small egg and bread crumb balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Cherry Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine cherries, lemon peel, cloves, cinnamon, and water in a pot.

  2. Boil the mixture for 30 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. Add sugar and lemon juice to the strained mixture to taste.

Make and cook the dumplings

  1. Whisk eggs, butter, bread crumbs, nutmeg, salt, and pepper together to form a dough.

  2. Butter your hands.

  3. Shape the dough into small balls, about the size of hazelnuts.

  4. Boil the balls in the strained fruit soup for 7 to 10 minutes.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  5. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the dough together and help the dumplings hold their shape when cooked.
Bread crumbs
Provide the body of the dough so the dumplings hold together.
Cherries
Supply the main fruit flavour and body of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the dumpling dough.

The step that matters

Boiling the dumplings in the soup. The dough balls need to be shaped to a consistent size and boiled gently for the stated time so they cook through and hold their shape without breaking apart in the soup.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, cinnamon, sugar, egg, butter, bread, nutmeg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, cinnamon, sugar, egg, butter, bread, nutmeg. 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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