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Fruit Soup

Fruit soup made from plums, cherries, or red currants and raspberries boiled with water, mixed with beaten egg and sugar, then strained and served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Fruit Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pick and wash the fruit carefully.

Make the soup

  1. Boil the fruit with the water until it becomes a pulp.

  2. Let it cool slightly, then stir in the beaten egg and sugar.

  3. Strain the soup and serve it cold.

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. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Plum + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together794 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

Plums, cherries, or red currants and raspberries
Provide the fruit flavour, colour and body once boiled down to a pulp.
Beaten egg
Lightly thickens the soup as it sets gently when stirred into warm fruit.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the fruit.

The step that matters

Stirring in the beaten egg. Egg proteins set when heated, so adding it to fruit that is too hot can scramble it into lumps. Letting the pulp cool slightly first lets the egg thicken the soup smoothly.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar. 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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