Skip to main content
Main

Cheese Soup

A creamy cheese soup made with milk, flour, butter, cheese, cayenne pepper, salt, and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Cheese Soup

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the soup

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for 1 minute.

  3. Gradually add the milk, stirring constantly until thickened.

  4. Add the grated cheese, cayenne pepper, and salt, stirring until the cheese melts.

  5. Remove from heat and stir in the beaten egg until well combined.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a smooth, creamy base as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a soup.
Grated cheese
Adds rich cheese flavor and body as it melts into the hot base.
Beaten egg
Adds richness and body; it thickens gently when stirred into the warm soup.

The step that matters

Stir in the beaten egg off the heat. Egg proteins set at high heat and can curdle or scramble. Removing the pan from the heat before adding the egg lets it blend smoothly and thicken gently.

“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.

More cheese soup recipes

Beer 5Cheddar 3Rice 3 See all 25 →

You might also like

Macaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipesCheese MakingCheese Making50 recipesCheese FrittersCheese Fritters34 recipesCheese OmeletteCheese Omelette31 recipes