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Noodle Soup

A soup made with egg and flour noodles simmered in milk and onion, finished with butter, flour, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Noodle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the noodles

  1. Break the egg and beat it lightly.

  2. Add 1-2 cups of flour and ¼ teaspoon of salt, then knead until smooth.

  3. Roll the dough into very thin sheets and dry on the board.

  4. Roll up the sheet and cut into shreds, then dry for one hour.

  5. Boil the shreds in salted water for ten minutes.

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, boil 3 pints of milk with the sliced onion and a bit of mace.

  2. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter and stir in 3 tablespoons of flour.

  3. Add this mixture to the boiling milk and season with salt, pepper, and celery.

  4. Beat 2 eggs lightly and stir them into the soup just before serving.

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 + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

Eggs
Bind the dough and enrich the soup, adding body and richness when stirred in.
Flour
Gives the dough structure for noodles and thickens the milk into a smooth sauce.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and, cooked with flour, helps thicken the soup.

The step that matters

Stir the beaten eggs into the soup just before serving. Eggs stirred into hot liquid can scramble into curds if the soup is too hot or boiled after adding them. Adding them at the end, off a hard boil, keeps the soup smooth and evenly enriched.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, flour, milk, onion, butter, pepper, celery):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, milk, onion, butter, pepper, celery. 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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