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A Delicate Chicken Soup

A light chicken soup thickened with bread crumbs and cream, seasoned with mace, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Delicate Chicken Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Place the chickens in a stew pan with the white stock, turnip, and carrot.

  2. Simmer gently for 1 hour.

  3. Remove the white flesh from the chickens and return the rest to the soup.

  4. Simmer for an additional 2 hours.

Make the bread crumb paste

  1. Pour a little boiling liquid over the bread crumbs and let them soak.

  2. Drain and combine with the removed chicken flesh in a mortar.

  3. Pound the mixture to a smooth paste.

  4. Gradually add the liquid.

Finish the soup

  1. Season with salt, pepper, and a pinch of pounded mace.

  2. Press through a sieve and bring to a boil.

  3. Mix the arrowroot with a little cold milk. Add it to the soup.

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. Turnip + arrowroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + arrowroottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 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

Chickens
Provide the meat that is pounded into the paste and the flavour of the soup.
Bread crumbs
Soak up liquid and thicken the soup into a smooth, body-rich texture when pounded.
White stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup and carries the chicken flavour.
Arrowroot
Thickens the soup to a glossy, lightly thick consistency.

The step that matters

Bring the soup to a boil after adding the arrowroot mixture. Arrowroot thickens when heated and then loses its thickening power if overcooked or boiled too long, so it should be stirred in and heated only until the soup thickens.

Swap the arrowroot

The recipe marks arrowroot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, turnip, carrot, bread, cream, pepper, mace):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, turnip, carrot, bread, cream, pepper, mace. 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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