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Cider Soup

A soup made with cider, sugar, bread, eggs, milk, flour, butter, and allspice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cider Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Boil the cider in a pot and skim off any foam.

  2. Stir in ½ cup of sugar.

Prepare the bread and custard

  1. In a skillet, brown the diced bread in butter.

  2. In a bowl, beat the eggs and mix in 2 tablespoons of sugar, 2 tablespoons of flour, and 1½ cups of milk.

Finish the soup

  1. Add the egg mixture and whole allspice to the boiling cider.

  2. Finally, stir in the browned bread.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,302 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Cider
Forms the liquid base and provides the main apple flavour of the soup.
Eggs
Thicken the soup as they set with heat, giving it body.
Flour
Helps thicken the egg and milk mixture so it blends smoothly into the hot cider.
Milk
Adds richness and softness, mellowing the cider's sharpness.
Bread
Browned in butter, it adds texture and toasted flavour that holds up in the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the egg mixture to the boiling cider. Eggs can curdle or scramble if they meet very hot liquid directly. Whisking a little hot cider into the egg mixture first gently raises its temperature, helping it blend smoothly and thicken evenly.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cider, sugar, bread, butter, egg, flour, milk):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, sugar, bread, butter, egg, flour, 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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