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A Delicate Soup

A soup made from soup meat, boiled egg, lemon slices, seasoned with coarse sea salt, served hot with crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and 43,327 recipes mention both. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Place soup meat in a pot with cold water.

  2. Boil until very tender.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt.

Assemble and serve

  1. Slice the hard boiled egg very fine.

  2. Place egg and lemon slices in each soup plate.

  3. Strain the meat broth over the egg and lemon.

  4. Serve hot with crackers.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Egg + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together43,327 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  2. Meat + eggtop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together6,274 recipes

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

  3. Meat + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together2,816 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Soup meat
Releases flavor and body into the broth as it simmers in water.
Hard boiled egg
Adds richness and soft texture to the soup in each plate.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the broth.

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, egg):

  1. Raisinabout as good a flavor fit
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Coconutabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Avocadoabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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