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Chicken Rice Soup

A soup made with a young hen, rice, and a batter of egg, sweet milk, baking powder, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Chicken Rice Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Dress the hen and soak it in coarse sea salt for several hours.

  2. Place the hen in a kettle with 3 quarts of water and boil moderately until tender.

Make the soup

  1. Add 1 cup of rice to the kettle 30 minutes before removing the chicken.

  2. Once the chicken is done, place it in the oven and bake with butter and a little water.

  3. Allow the rice soup to cook for 30 minutes after removing the chicken.

  4. Make a batter with 1 egg, ½ cup of sweet milk, a little baking powder, and enough flour to stiffen.

  5. Slowly drop spoonfuls of the batter into the boiling soup and cook for 15 minutes.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Hen
Provides the meat and flavourful broth that forms the base of the soup.
Rice
Thickens the soup and adds body as its starch softens during cooking.
Egg
Binds the batter and helps the dumplings set and hold their shape.
Flour
Gives the batter enough structure to stiffen and hold its spoonful shape.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the dumplings rise and turn light.

The step that matters

Drop the batter into the boiling soup. The batter must be stiff and added slowly into a boiling liquid so the spoonfuls set as dumplings instead of dissolving and clouding the broth.

“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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