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Soup

Buttermilk Soup

A soup made from buttermilk and cooked rice, sweetened with sugar and flavored with cinnamon or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,137 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Buttermilk Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cook rice with water as directed for 'Water Rice'.

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, combine cooked rice and buttermilk, mixing well.

  2. Stir over heat until the mixture boils.

  3. Add sugar and simmer with cinnamon or vanilla for 30 minutes.

  4. Adjust salt if necessary.

  5. Mix in dried fruits before serving if desired.

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. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Buttermilk + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Cinnamon + curranttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Buttermilk + cinnamontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together769 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Buttermilk
Provides tangy acidity and a creamy, thin body to the soup.
Cooked rice
Gives the soup its body and soft, starchy texture as it simmers.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tang of the buttermilk.

The step that matters

Stir over heat until the mixture boils. Buttermilk can curdle or separate when heated quickly or too hard. Stirring constantly over gentle heat until it just boils keeps the mixture smooth and creamy.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (buttermilk, rice, sugar, cinnamon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against buttermilk, rice, sugar, cinnamon. 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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