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A Delicate Chicken Soup

A soup made from young chickens, white stock, turnip, carrot, and bread crumbs, thickened with cream and arrowroot.

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

Simmer the chickens

  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.

  4. Return the bones to the soup.

  5. Simmer for an additional 2 hours.

Make the pounded mixture

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in a little boiling liquid.

  2. Drain the soaked bread crumbs.

  3. Pound the soaked bread with the removed chicken flesh in a mortar.

  4. Add liquid gradually to the mortar mixture.

  5. Season the mixture with salt, pepper, and mace.

  6. Press the seasoned mixture through a sieve.

  7. Boil the mixture again.

  8. Add the boiling cream to the mixture.

Thicken the soup

  1. Mix arrowroot with cold milk.

  2. Add the mixture to the soup if it is not thick enough.

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

Young chickens
Provide the meat and flavour that make up the body of the soup.
Bread crumbs
Soaked and pounded, they help bind and thicken the smooth mixture.
Boiling cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished soup.
Arrowroot
A starch that thickens the soup when mixed with cold liquid and heated.
White stock
Forms the liquid base in which the chickens cook and flavour the soup.

The step that matters

Thickening with arrowroot. Arrowroot must be mixed smoothly with cold milk before it goes into hot soup; added dry or to boiling liquid it clumps, and it thickens only once heated, so the soup should not be boiled hard after adding it.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, turnip, carrot, bread, pepper, cream, arrowroot):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, turnip, carrot, bread, pepper, cream, arrowroot. 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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White 9Almond 8Creamy 7Friar's 6Plain 5with Dumplings 3 See all 163 →

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