Skip to main content
Main

Chestnut Soup

A soup made from chestnuts, stock, milk, bread crumbs, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and fried sippets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Chestnut Soup

Why it works: Chestnut and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 180 recipes. Both carry maltol, which smells caramel, sweet. The science ↓

Chestnut Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chestnuts

  1. Remove the outer rind from the chestnuts and place them in a saucepan of cold water.

  2. Heat the water until just boiling, then remove the chestnuts and peel off the under skin.

  3. Stew the chestnuts in enough stock to cover them until tender.

Make the soup

  1. Pound the chestnuts in a mortar to a paste, reserving a dozen whole for later.

  2. Mix the chestnut paste with the bread crumbs, salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg.

  3. Gradually add the stock from boiling the chestnuts, using 1 quart of this mixture and 1 pint of milk for every quart of stock.

  4. Boil everything together again with the reserved whole chestnuts, adding more stock if the soup is too thick.

Serve

  1. Before serving, add fried sippets to the tureen.

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. Chestnut + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together180 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Chestnut + peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Chestnut + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together191 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Chestnuts
Provide the starchy, creamy base that thickens the soup when pounded to a paste.
Bread crumbs
Help thicken the soup and give it body.
Milk
Adds richness and a softer, creamier texture to the soup.
Stock
Supplies the liquid that carries the chestnut paste into a soup.

The step that matters

Stewing the chestnuts until tender. Chestnuts that are not fully tender will stay grainy and will not blend into a smooth paste, so the soup's texture suffers.

Swap the chestnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, nutmeg, milk):

  1. Chestnutthe original
  2. Walnutfits about as well
  3. Beansfits less well
  4. Almondfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, nutmeg, 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.

More chestnut soup recipes

Spanish 5 See all 73 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes