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Vermicelli Milk Soup

A simple milk soup with vermicelli, celery salt, eggs, optionally flavored with cinnamon and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Milk and egg 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 ↓

Vermicelli Milk Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a pot, bring 1 quart of milk to a boil.

  2. Stir in ¼ teaspoon of celery salt.

  3. Slowly add 2 ounces of vermicelli and stir for 20 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in 2 beaten eggs.

  5. Optionally, flavor with cinnamon and sugar.

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. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  2. Milk + celerytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  3. Celery + eggtop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Vermicelli
Thickens the milk as its starch releases during simmering, giving the soup body.
Eggs
Enrich the soup and add body when stirred in off the heat.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and provides richness and creaminess.

The step that matters

Stir in the eggs off the heat. Eggs thicken by setting when heated, so adding them off the heat and stirring steadily blends them smoothly instead of letting them scramble into curds in the hot milk.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg. 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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