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Combination Soup

A soup made by combining leftover soup with stock, topped with toasted Boston crackers soaked in butter and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Combination Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

  1. Combine the remains of yesterday's soup and reserved stock in a pot and heat almost to boiling.

Prepare the crackers

  1. Split the Boston crackers.

  2. Toast the crackers until crisp.

  3. Butter the crackers while hot.

  4. Place the buttered crackers in the oven until the butter is absorbed.

Assemble and serve

  1. Wet the bottom of your soup tureen with a little boiling milk.

  2. Pour the soup over the soaked crackers.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Boston crackers
Soak up the soup and soften, forming the body of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the crackers and helps them brown lightly while toasting.
Reserved stock
Supplies the savoury liquid that flavours the soup poured over the crackers.

The step that matters

Toast the crackers until crisp. Crackers that are only partly toasted hold less structure, so they turn soggy and collapse when the hot soup is poured over them. Thorough toasting drives off moisture and sets the starch, letting them absorb liquid while keeping some texture.

“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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