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Noodle Soup

A simple noodle soup made by rolling a stiff dough of eggs and flour into thin strips and adding them to plain beef soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Noodle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the noodles

  1. In a bowl, combine 2 eggs with enough flour to form a very stiff dough.

  2. Roll out the dough as thin as possible.

  3. Let the rolled dough dry slightly.

  4. Fold one edge of the dough and roll it into a long cylinder.

  5. Slice the rolled dough into thin strips using a sharp knife.

Serve

  1. Add the noodle strips to boiling plain beef soup just 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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + beeftop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Eggs
Bind the flour and add richness and structure to the dough.
Flour
Forms the stiff dough that holds its shape when rolled and sliced.

The step that matters

Rolling the dough thin. Thin dough cooks quickly and evenly in the broth, while thick dough stays chewy or raw in the middle.

“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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