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Almond Soup

A soup made from white stock, mace, cloves, stale bread, sweet almonds, egg yolk, and milk or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Almond Soup

Why it works: Mace and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Almond Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Prepare white stock from bones soaked in salt and water or from fresh meat.

  2. Boil the stock with mace, cloves, and stale bread.

  3. Remove the spices from the stock.

  4. Strain the soup through a sieve.

Add the almonds and finish

  1. Blanch the almonds.

  2. Pound the almonds with the hard-boiled egg yolk.

  3. Slowly add the almond paste to the cooled stock.

  4. Boil the soup again.

  5. Add milk or cream 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Clove + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,605 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  5. Almond + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,800 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet almonds
Provide the main body and nutty flavour of the soup once pounded into a paste.
Hard-boiled egg yolk
Helps bind the pounded almonds into a smooth paste that blends into the stock.
Stale bread
Adds body and thickening to the stock as it simmers.
Milk or cream
Adds richness and a smoother, softer texture to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Slowly add the almond paste to the cooled stock. Adding the paste slowly to cooled stock helps it disperse evenly without clumping or curdling, giving a smooth soup.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, bread, almond, egg, milk):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, bread, almond, egg, milk. 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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