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Chicken Soup, Delicate

A chicken soup thickened with cream and arrowroot, seasoned with salt, cayenne, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chicken Soup, Delicate

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Pluck and wash the chickens thoroughly.

  2. Place them in a stewpan with the stock, turnip, and carrot.

  3. Simmer gently for nearly an hour.

  4. Remove the white flesh from the chickens and return the bones to the soup.

  5. Simmer for another two hours.

Make the paste

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in a little boiling liquid, then drain.

  2. Pound the soaked bread with the removed chicken flesh to a smooth paste, adding liquid gradually.

  3. Season with salt, cayenne, and a little pounded mace, then strain through a sieve.

Finish the soup

  1. Bring the mixture to a boil and add the boiling cream.

  2. If the soup is not thick enough, mix the arrowroot with a little cold milk and add it smoothly.

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. Turnip + arrowroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + arrowroottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Young chickens
Provide the main flavour and the white flesh that is pounded into the soup.
Bread crumbs
Soaked and pounded to a paste, they give the soup body and a smooth, thick texture.
Boiling cream
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Arrowroot
A starch that thickens the soup when mixed with cold liquid and added at the end.

The step that matters

Adding the arrowroot. Starch must be mixed with cold liquid first so it does not clump, then added to hot soup and kept just at a simmer so it thickens smoothly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, turnip, carrot, bread, cream, arrowroot, milk):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, turnip, carrot, bread, cream, arrowroot, 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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