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Berlin Milk Soup

A sweet milk soup thickened with flour and sugar, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Berlin Milk Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Heat a frying pan over low heat and add the flour, stirring constantly to prevent lumps.

  2. In a separate pot, boil the milk with the sugar.

Make the soup

  1. Mix the flour into the boiling milk, then add the water.

  2. Continue to boil the mixture together until thickened.

Serve

  1. Serve with bread cut into various shapes and fried until golden.

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. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the soup its body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and adds richness and creamy flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the milk.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour before adding it to the milk. Flour dispersed in hot liquid without constant stirring clumps into lumps that do not dissolve easily. Stirring the flour while it heats and then whisking it into the boiling milk keeps the starch evenly distributed so the soup thickens smoothly.

“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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