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Soup

Beer Soup with Milk

A soup made by boiling beer and milk, sweetened with sugar and cinnamon, flavored with rye bread crust and lemon rind, finished with egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 with Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beer and milk

  1. Boil the beer separately.

  2. Boil the milk separately.

  3. Sweeten the beer with sugar.

  4. Add cinnamon to the beer.

  5. Add the crust of the rye loaf to the beer.

  6. Add the grated lemon rind to the beer.

Make the soup

  1. Beat the egg yolks in a bowl.

  2. Gradually add the hot milk to the egg yolks.

  3. Mix in the beer.

  4. Serve in small bowls.

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. Cinnamon + ryetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together85 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Milk + ryetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together918 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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 bitter, malty flavour.
Milk
Adds creaminess and body to the soup.
Egg yolks
Thicken the soup and add richness when gently heated with the liquid.
Sugar
Sweetens the beer to balance its bitterness.

The step that matters

Gradually add the hot milk to the egg yolks. Adding hot liquid slowly, while whisking, tempers the yolks so they warm gently without scrambling. Adding it all at once can curdle the egg and leave lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beer, milk, sugar, cinnamon, rye, 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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