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Egg Soup

Egg Soup is a savory dish made with toasted bread, egg yolks, butter, milk, stock, spices, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Egg Soup

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the bread

  1. Sprinkle both sides of the bread slices with sugar.

  2. Place the bread in a 400°F (200°C) oven to brown.

Make the soup

  1. In a bowl, mix the egg yolks and butter.

  2. Add boiling milk to the egg mixture and stir well.

  3. Combine with white stock, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and parsley.

  4. Pour the mixture over the toasted bread.

  5. Keep hot for 10 minutes 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.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the liquid and enrich it into a smooth, custard-like soup.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the egg mixture.
Bread
Soaks up the liquid and provides the body of the soup.
Milk
Forms the creamy base that the egg yolks gently thicken.
Sugar
Sweetens the bread and promotes browning as it toasts.

The step that matters

Add boiling milk to the egg mixture and stir well. Adding very hot liquid to egg yolks too quickly can scramble them. Stirring constantly while pouring in the milk tempers the yolks so the soup stays smooth and thickens evenly.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Clovefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, egg, butter, milk, pepper, nutmeg. 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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