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Egg Barley for Soup

A soup made by adding grated egg dough to boiling broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Barley for Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the egg slightly.

  2. Add salt and enough flour to form a very hard ball of dough.

  3. Grate the dough.

  4. Dry the grated dough for a few minutes on a board.

Cook and serve

  1. Gradually drop the dried dough into boiling soup.

  2. Let it boil for 5 to 10 minutes, then serve.

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 + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg
Binds the flour into a dough that holds together when grated.
Flour
Forms the structure of the dough, which firms up into small pieces that hold their shape in the soup.

The step that matters

Drying the grated dough. If the grated pieces stay damp, they clump together and turn gummy in the boiling soup. Drying them briefly on a board lets the surface firm so the pieces stay separate and cook evenly.

“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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