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White Chicken Soup

A creamy soup made with chicken, almonds, lemon peel, mace, eggs, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,655 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

White Chicken Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pound the almonds to a paste with 2 teaspoons of water.

  2. Add the pounded poultry and mix well.

  3. Stir in the chopped lemon peel and pounded mace.

Make the soup

  1. Heat the white stock to boiling and pour it over the mixture.

  2. Simmer for 1 hour.

  3. Mix the egg yolks with the cream and add to the soup.

  4. Bring to a boil and serve immediately.

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. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Almond + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  4. Almond + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together858 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetylpyrazine (roast).

  5. Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,009 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet almonds
Pounded to a paste, they thicken the soup and give it a rich, creamy body.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished soup.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Mixed with cream, they enrich the soup and help it thicken smoothly.
Cold poultry
Pounded into the almond paste, it provides the main body and protein of the soup.
White stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup, carrying all the other flavors.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk and cream mixture. Once the yolks are in, the soup must be heated gently and not allowed to boil hard, because the egg proteins can curdle and turn grainy when overheated.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (almond, bread, lemon, cream, egg):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, bread, lemon, cream, egg. 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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