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Simple White Soup

A white soup made from turkey stock fat, onion, soaked rice, milk, and beaten eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Simple White Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Remove the fat from the top of your turkey soup stock and strain it, rubbing the dressing through a colander.

Simmer and strain

  1. Simmer for one hour with the sliced onion and soaked rice until the rice is soft, being careful not to scorch.

  2. Strain through a soup sieve into a tureen.

Season and finish

  1. Add pepper and salt to taste.

  2. Stir in the hot milk and the beaten eggs, cooking for one minute.

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. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  2. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Turkey + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together281 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Soaked rice
Softens as it simmers, thickening the soup and giving it body.
Beaten eggs
Set when stirred into the hot soup, adding richness and thickening.
Hot milk
Adds creaminess and softens the flavor of the soup.
Sliced onion
Contributes savory aroma and flavor to the stock during simmering.

The step that matters

Stirring in the beaten eggs. Egg proteins set when heated, so the soup must be hot enough to thicken it, but kept below a hard boil to avoid curdling or scrambling the eggs.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

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