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Chicken Soup with Eggs

A chicken broth with rice, seasoned with salt and pepper, served with poached eggs and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Chicken Soup with Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Place the trussed chicken in the water with the rice and boil for 3 hours, or until the bones slip from the meat.

  2. Remove the chicken, season with salt, and set aside in a cool place for tomorrow.

Make the soup

  1. Cool and skim the soup, then strain it back into the pot, ensuring the rice passes through the sieve.

  2. Add the chopped parsley and simmer while heating the milk in a separate vessel.

Poach and serve

  1. Poach an egg for each person, trimming each egg round after removing it from the water.

  2. Pour the hot milk into a tureen, followed by the soup. Stir well and carefully place the poached eggs on top.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  4. Rice + parsleytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,762 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Slow boiling turns its connective tissue tender, so the bones release easily and the broth gains body.
Rice
Passing the cooked rice through the sieve thickens the soup and gives it a smooth, creamy body.
Milk
Adds richness and a mild sweetness that softens the broth's savoury flavour.
Eggs
Poached whole in the hot soup, they set firm and add substance and richness to each bowl.

The step that matters

Poaching the eggs. Eggs poached in hot liquid need gentle, steady simmering so the whites set around the yolks without breaking apart or becoming rubbery. Trimming the ragged edges after removal gives each egg a neat shape.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, milk, rice, pepper, egg):

  1. Turmericfits about as well
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, milk, rice, pepper, 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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