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White Soup, Portable

A gelatinous soup made from veal and chicken feet, served with vermicelli and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Veal and chicken are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,243 recipes. Both carry 3-butanedione, which smells buttery, creamy. The science ↓

White Soup, Portable

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. In a large iron kettle, combine the veal and chicken feet with the water.

  2. Stew until the meat is tender, then cover and simmer gently for 8 hours.

  3. Fill a tea cup with the soup and let it cool.

  4. If the cooled soup is firm enough to cut, strain it through a sieve to remove fat.

Set the jelly

  1. Pour the clear jelly into cups and place them in a pan of boiling water until they are glue-like.

  2. Let them cool, then run a ring around the edges and turn them onto a piece of new flannel to draw out moisture.

  3. Turn the jelly every 7 hours until completely hard.

  4. Store in tin canisters in a dry place.

Serve

  1. To serve, cut a piece the size of a walnut, pour 1 pint of boiling water over it, and stir until dissolved.

  2. Season with salt to taste.

  3. For soup, boil some vermicelli in water, then add it to the melted soup with thin slices of toasted bread.

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. Veal + chickentop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-butanedione (buttery, creamy).

  2. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

  3. Veal + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,056 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-3-hexenol (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Breaks down during stewing to give the stock body and a jelly-like texture when chilled.
Chicken feet
Their collagen dissolves into gelatin, which makes the stock set firm when cooled.

The step that matters

Straining the cooled soup before setting. Fat left in the stock can prevent a clear, firm set and makes the jelly greasy, so the cooled soup should be checked for firmness and skimmed of fat first.

“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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