Skip to main content
Drink

Beer Soup

A simple soup made with beer, water, sugar, rye bread, cinnamon, lemon juice, zwieback, and optional currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Beer Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the beer with water in a pot.

  2. Boil the mixture with sugar and grated rye bread.

  3. Add the stick of cinnamon and lemon juice.

  4. Pour the soup over small pieces of zwieback.

  5. If desired, boil a handful of dried currants and add them to the soup.

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. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Rye + cinnamontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together85 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Rye + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together59 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Rye + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together119 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Beer
Forms the liquid base and gives the soup its characteristic malty flavor.
Stale rye bread
Thickens the soup as it boils, adding body and a grainy flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sourness of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the soup and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Boiling the bread with the beer and sugar. Bread must be fully softened and dissolved into the liquid as it boils, or the soup stays gritty. Keeping the boil gentle prevents the thin liquid from scorching on the bottom of the pot.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beer, sugar, rye, bread, cinnamon, lemon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beer, sugar, rye, bread, cinnamon, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Spruce BeerSpruce Beer58 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesBlack Currant CordialBlack Currant Cordial11 recipes