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Egg Soup

A hearty soup made with ham, veal, vegetables, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Egg Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the ham, veal, onion, and carrot into pieces.

  2. Combine the meat, onion, carrot, parsley, and water in a pot and bring to a slow boil.

Make the broth

  1. Maintain the boil for 3.5 hours, ensuring the water reduces by no more than one-third.

  2. Strain the broth, cool it, and skim off the fat.

  3. Return the broth to the pot, adding the grated turnip and mashed potato.

  4. Season to taste and simmer for 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Pour the soup into a tureen and top with poached eggs, one for each person.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean ham
Gives the broth its meaty flavour and body as it simmers for hours.
Lean veal
Releases gelatin and savoury flavour into the broth during the long simmer.
Eggs
Set when poached, providing a soft, tender protein garnish for each bowl.
Potato
Mashed into the broth, it thickens the soup slightly and adds body.
Turnip
Adds mild, slightly sweet earthy flavour to the broth.

The step that matters

Maintain the slow boil for 3.5 hours. A gentle, steady simmer extracts flavour and gelatin from the meat while keeping the broth clear. A hard boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and clouds it, and letting the water reduce too much concentrates it unevenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, veal, carrot, turnip, potato, parsley, egg):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, veal, carrot, turnip, potato, parsley, 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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