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White Soup

A creamy soup made with chicken, veal, cream, almonds, eggs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and veal are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,243 recipes. Both carry 3-butanedione, which smells buttery, creamy. The science ↓

White Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Rub butter over the bottom of a porcelain, granite, or iron kettle.

  2. Add chicken, veal, grated bread, and cold water; bring gradually to a boil.

  3. Stir in cayenne pepper, salt, and ground mace.

  4. Cook slowly until the chicken begins to separate from the bones.

  5. Remove from heat, take out the meat, and strain the broth.

Finish the soup

  1. Skim off the fat and add finely chopped egg whites and mashed yolks.

  2. Add blanched powdered almonds and let boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Warm the cream and add it to the broth; boil for 3 minutes and serve.

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. Chicken + vealtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-butanedione (buttery, creamy).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

  4. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Cream + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Chicken
Forms the flavourful broth and supplies the meat that is later removed.
Veal
Adds gelatin and body to the broth, giving it a richer mouthfeel.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the finished soup.
Grated bread
Helps thicken the broth and gives it a softer body.
Almonds
Contribute body and a subtle nutty flavour when blanched and powdered into the soup.
Eggs
Egg whites and yolks add body and enrich the broth as they cook into it.

The step that matters

Adding the cream. Cream boiled too hard or too long can curdle or separate. Warming it first and boiling only briefly keeps the soup smooth and silky.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, veal, cream, bread, almond, egg, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, veal, cream, bread, almond, egg, pepper. 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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