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Duchess Soup

A creamy milk soup with onions, butter, flour, eggs, and optional cheese, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Duchess Soup

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Duchess Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Bring the milk to a boil in a pot.

  2. In a skillet, fry the butter and onions together for 8 minutes.

  3. Add the flour and cook for 2 more minutes, being careful not to burn.

  4. Stir the mixture into the boiling milk and cook for 10 minutes.

  5. Strain the soup through a fine sieve and return it to the pot.

Enrich and finish

  1. Add the cheese to the soup.

  2. Beat the eggs with a pinch of pepper and ¼ teaspoon salt.

  3. Season the soup with additional salt and pepper to taste.

  4. Hold a colander over the soup and pour the beaten eggs through it, allowing them to cook gently for 3 minutes without boiling.

  5. Serve the soup hot.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Milk
Forms the liquid body of the soup and carries the other flavours.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they fry in butter, adding savoury depth to the soup.
Eggs
Cook gently in the hot soup to thicken it and give it a silky texture.
Butter
Fat that fries the onions and carries their flavour into the soup.
Flour
Cooked with the butter and onions, it thickens the milk as it heats.

The step that matters

Pouring the beaten eggs through the colander. The eggs must cook gently without boiling. Boiling makes egg proteins tighten and curdle, leaving the soup grainy rather than smooth.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, butter, flour, pepper, cheese. 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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