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Simple White Soup

A light soup made with turkey stock, rice, eggs, and milk, seasoned with pepper and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Simple White Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Remove the fat from the top of the turkey soup stock and strain it through a colander.

  2. Simmer the strained stock with the sliced onion and soaked rice for 1 hour until the rice is soft, stirring to prevent scorching.

  3. Strain the mixture through a soup sieve into a tureen.

  4. Add pepper and coarse sea salt to taste.

Add the egg

  1. In a separate bowl, stir and cook the beaten eggs in the hot milk for 1 minute, then add to the soup.

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. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Turkey + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together281 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey soup stock
Provides the main liquid and savoury flavour of the soup.
Soaked rice
Softens while simmering and thickens the soup body.
Eggs
Cooked in hot milk, they set and add richness and body to the soup.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the texture of the cooked eggs.

The step that matters

Adding the egg mixture to the soup. Eggs can curdle or scramble if they are cooked too hot or too long. Cooking them gently in hot milk and adding them to the soup slowly helps keep them smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, rice, pepper, milk, egg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, rice, pepper, milk, egg. 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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