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Wine Soup

A soup made with wine, water, eggs, almonds, cinnamon, sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Wine Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil 1 pint of wine and 1 quart of water for a few minutes.

  2. Add the juice of 2 lemons and thicken with the yolks of 4 eggs.

Add the almond garnish

  1. Frost the egg whites and mix with a few sweet almonds.

  2. Drop the mixture into the soup on a tablespoon while it is boiling.

Cool and sweeten

  1. Put the soup on ice to cool.

  2. Add sugar according to taste.

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. Almond + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  3. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Yolks thicken the soup as their proteins set when gently heated.
Wine
Provides the main flavour and a light acidity to the broth.
Lemons
Their juice adds acidity that brightens the soup's flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, balancing the acidity of the wine and lemon.
Almonds
Add a nutty flavour and some texture to the egg mixture.

The step that matters

Thickening with the egg yolks. Egg yolk proteins thicken liquids by setting when heated gently. If the soup is kept at a hard boil after the yolks go in, the proteins can curdle into loose bits instead of forming a smooth, thickened soup.

Swap the almond

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wine, egg, cinnamon, sugar, lemon):

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Chickpeafits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits less well
  4. Pistachiofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, egg, cinnamon, sugar, lemon. 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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