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White Portable Soup

A clear broth made from veal and fowls' feet, served with vermicelli and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Veal and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,056 recipes. Both carry cis-3-hexenol, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

White Portable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Chop the veal and fowls' feet into pieces and wash them well.

  2. Place them in a large iron kettle with 3 gallons of water and stew until the meat is tender.

  3. Cover and continue to stew for 8 hours.

  4. Fill a teacup with the soup and let it cool; if it hardens enough to cut, strain through a sieve to remove fat.

Set and dry the jelly

  1. Pour the clear jelly into cups and place them in a saucepan with boiling water until they are glue-like.

  2. Let them cool, then turn them onto a piece of new flannel to draw out moisture, turning them every 7 hours until very hard.

  3. Store in tin canisters in a dry place.

Serve

  1. To use, cut a piece the size of a walnut, pour 1 pint of boiling water over it, and stir until dissolved; season with salt.

  2. For soup, steep vermicelli in water and boil; then add 1 cup of soup to 1 pint of water, simmer, and serve in a soup tureen with toasted bread and vermicelli.

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. Veal + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,056 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-3-hexenol (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Breaks down during long stewing to release gelatin, giving the broth body and a jelly-like set.
Fowls' feet
Their collagen converts to gelatin during stewing, which thickens the broth and helps it set.

The step that matters

Testing the jelly before straining. The cooled sample must firm enough to cut before straining. If the stock is too weak or not reduced enough, it will not set and the jelly will fail to harden when dried.

“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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