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Egg Soup

Egg Soup is a savory soup made with egg yolks, butter, milk, stock, and toasted stale bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Egg Soup

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the bread

  1. Sprinkle sugar on both sides of the stale bread slices.

  2. Place the bread in a 400°F (200°C) oven to brown.

Make the soup

  1. In a bowl, mix the egg yolks and butter with the boiling milk.

  2. Add the mixture to the white stock and season with pepper, salt, nutmeg, and chopped parsley.

  3. Pour the mixture over the toasted bread and keep it hot for 10 minutes before serving.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the base that soaks up the soup and gives it body.
Egg yolks
Thicken the liquid as they set gently with heat and add richness.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Milk
Provides a creamy liquid that softens the bread and mellows the eggs.
White stock
Supplies the savoury liquid base of the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the egg mixture to the hot stock. Egg yolks thicken when gently heated but can scramble if they meet very hot liquid too quickly. Mixing them with hot milk and butter first, then adding them to the stock gradually, helps them blend smoothly.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sugar, egg, butter, milk, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Clovefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, egg, butter, milk, pepper, nutmeg. 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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