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Potage a LA Keine

A French chicken soup with a smooth paste of meat, egg yolks, and bread, finished with cream and celery.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and 2,769 recipes mention both. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Stew the fowls in veal broth for about an hour.

  2. Remove the fowls, skin them, and pound the white meat until smooth.

  3. Mash the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs with the soaked French roll and mix with the pounded meat to form a paste.

  4. Pass the paste through a sieve.

  5. Strain the broth.

Make the potage

  1. Gradually add the paste and boil briskly while stirring.

  2. Remove from heat.

  3. Warm the cream.

  4. Gently pour the warm cream into the soup.

  5. Season the broth with salt and mace.

  6. Add celery.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Mace + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Milk + macetop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together3,346 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  3. Mace + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together4,009 recipes
  4. Veal + macetop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together3,761 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Egg + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together88,465 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Young fowls
Provide the main meat, which is cooked in broth and pounded into the thickened soup.
Hard-boiled eggs
Their yolks, mashed into the paste, add richness and body to the soup.
French roll
Soaked and mashed into the paste, it helps thicken the soup and give it body.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Gradually add the paste and boil briskly while stirring. Adding the paste slowly and stirring keeps it from clumping, so it blends evenly. Boiling briskly then cooks the starch and egg and thickens the soup smoothly.

Flavor stand-ins for the celery

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

  1. Nutmegbetter flavor fit
  2. Cinnamonbetter flavor fit
  3. White pepperbetter flavor fit
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, egg, milk, mace, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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