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Milk Soup

A creamy potato and leek soup thickened with tapioca and flavored with butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and leek work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Milk Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the potatoes and leeks into quarters.

Make the soup

  1. In a saucepan, combine the potatoes, leeks, butter, salt, and pepper with 2 quarts of boiling water.

  2. Boil for 1 hour, then strain through a sieve back into the saucepan.

  3. Add the milk and sprinkle in the tapioca.

  4. Boil for 15 minutes and serve.

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. Potato + leektop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

  3. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  5. Leek + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together965 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Break down during boiling to give the soup body and a thick, starchy texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the soup.
Milk
Adds creaminess and a mild sweetness to the soup base.
Crushed tapioca
Starch that thickens the liquid as it boils, giving the soup more body.

The step that matters

Boil for 15 minutes after adding the milk and tapioca. Tapioca starch thickens only when it is heated and kept at a boil long enough to gelatinize. Stopping early leaves the soup thin and grainy, while boiling milk too hard can scorch it on the base of the pan.

Swap the leek

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Leekthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, butter, milk, pepper. 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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