Skip to main content
Main

Lemon Soup

A chicken broth soup thickened with eggs, cream, and lemon, served with forcemeat balls and toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lemon Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the forcemeat balls

  1. Combine chopped cold chicken, bread crumbs, herbs, and egg yolk to form forcemeat balls.

Poach and thicken

  1. Poach the balls in chicken broth for a few minutes.

  2. Remove the balls and thicken the broth with cream or milk mixed with eggs, lemon juice, nutmeg, pepper, and salt.

Serve

  1. Return the forcemeat balls to the soup and serve with sippets of toast.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Cream + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken the broth into a silky, lightly set soup when gently heated with the cream.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and a smooth, mellow body to the thickened broth.
Chicken broth
Forms the base liquid that carries the flavour of the whole soup.
Bread crumbs
Bind the chopped chicken into tender forcemeat balls that hold together in the broth.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the soup and balances the richness of the eggs and cream.

The step that matters

Thickening the broth with egg and cream. Eggs thicken through gentle heat; if the broth boils after adding the egg mixture, the eggs can scramble and curdle, leaving the soup grainy.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesChicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipes