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A Norwegian Sweet Soup

A sweet Norwegian soup made with rice, raisins, cinnamon, egg yolks, sugar, cider, and optional sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,390 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

A Norwegian Sweet Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil rice in 3 cups of water with the cinnamon stick for nearly 1 hour.

  2. About 15 minutes before it is done, add the raisins.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the egg yolks with the sugar until white and creamy.

  2. Stir in the sweet cider.

  3. Remove the soup from the heat.

  4. Add a little of the hot soup to the egg mixture, stirring well.

  5. Quickly mix everything together.

  6. Add sherry for extra flavor, if desired.

  7. 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. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cider + sherrytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together143 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Rice + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the soup into a creamy texture when gently heated and enrich its richness.
Rice
Cooks down in the liquid to give the soup body and a soft, starchy texture.
Raisins
Add chewy sweetness and plump up as they simmer in the soup.
Sugar
Sweetens the egg yolks and balances the tartness of the cider.

The step that matters

Add the hot soup to the egg mixture gradually, then mix quickly. Adding hot liquid slowly, while stirring, warms the egg yolks gently so they blend in smoothly. Adding them all at once or heating too hard can scramble the yolks into lumps.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, cinnamon, egg, sugar, cider, sherry):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, cinnamon, egg, sugar, cider, sherry. 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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