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Invalids' Milk Soup

A milk soup made with stale bread, butter, egg yolk, and optional cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Invalids' Milk Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Brown the stale bread squares in hot butter in a skillet.

  2. Add milk and salt to the skillet and heat until hot.

  3. Beat the egg yolk in a bowl.

  4. Slowly pour the hot soup over the yolk while stirring to prevent curdling.

Serve

  1. Add cream before serving, if desired.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Soaks up the warm milk and gives the soup body and a toasted, browned flavor from the butter.
Butter
Fat that browns the bread and carries flavor into the soup.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the soup and provides its creamy, mild sweetness.
Egg yolk
Thickens the soup gently and adds richness when tempered with hot liquid.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot soup over the yolk. Adding hot liquid to the yolk too quickly can scramble the egg. Pouring slowly while stirring warms the yolk gradually so it blends in smoothly and thickens the soup instead of curdling.

“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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