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Chicken Cream Soup

A soup made from boiled chicken, onion, and a creamy egg mixture, finished with milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Chicken Cream Soup

Why it works: Egg and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Chicken Cream Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil the fowl and onion in 4 quarts of cold water until reduced to 2 quarts.

  2. Remove the fowl and let it cool.

  3. Chop the breast meat finely.

  4. Mix the chopped chicken with the pounded yolks of the hard-boiled eggs and rub through a colander.

Make the soup

  1. Cool, skim, and strain the soup into a pot.

  2. Season the soup, add the chicken-and-egg mixture, and simmer for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Pour into a tureen and add the boiling milk.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  2. Onion + milktop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Onion + eggtop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,333 recipes

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

Onion and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,333 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

Old fowl
Gives the soup its main chicken flavour and body as it simmers down.
Hard-boiled eggs
Their pounded yolks thicken the soup and add richness to the cream soup.
Milk
Added at the end, it gives the soup its creamy, mellow finish.

The step that matters

Simmering the soup down to 2 quarts. Reducing the broth concentrates its flavour and sets the final body of the soup, so the cook must boil until the stated volume is reached rather than stopping early.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk. 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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