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Soup

Cream Soups

A simple cream soup made with sweet milk, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cream Soups

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a double boiler.

  2. Add the flour and blend well.

  3. Gradually add the milk, stirring constantly.

  4. Continue stirring until the mixture thickens and there is no raw taste of flour.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor and giving the soup a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells with heat, forming a smooth, body-giving sauce.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a creamy soup.

The step that matters

Cooking until the flour taste is gone. Flour starch thickens the milk quickly, but it needs sustained gentle heat and stirring to swell fully and lose its raw, pasty taste. Stopping early leaves the soup thick-looking yet floury.

“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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