Skip to main content
Main

Potage LA Reine

A French soup made with young fowls, veal broth, eggs, French roll, cream, salt, mace, celery, and optional almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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, tree nuts (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the fowl

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

Finish the soup

  1. Strain the broth and add the paste gradually, stirring continuously.

  2. Boil briskly for a short time.

  3. Remove from heat and warm the cream, then gently pour it into the soup.

  4. Season the broth with salt and mace, and add celery; flavor the cream with almonds if desired.

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. Cream + macetop 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. Cream + almondtop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together5,129 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fowls
Provide the cooked white meat that is pounded into the paste that thickens and enriches the soup.
Hard-boiled eggs
Their yolks blend into the paste, adding richness and body to the soup.
French roll
Soaked bread that helps bind the paste and give the soup a smooth, thick texture.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the finished soup a smooth, mellow texture.
Veal broth
Forms the liquid base of the soup and carries the flavor of the meat.

The step that matters

Adding the paste gradually to the broth. Adding the paste in small amounts while stirring continuously keeps it evenly dispersed, so the soup thickens smoothly without lumps.

Flavor stand-ins for the almond

The recipe marks almond as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, egg, milk, cream, mace, celery):

  1. Walnutbetter flavor fit
  2. Peasabout as good a flavor fit
  3. Almondthe original
  4. Pecansabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, egg, milk, cream, mace, celery. 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.

You might also like

Illustration of Cream of Celery SoupIllustrationCream of Celery Soup113 recipesIllustration of Almond SoupIllustrationAlmond Soup60 recipesIllustration of Veal PattiesIllustrationVeal Patties50 recipesIllustration of Celery StewIllustrationCelery Stew25 recipes