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Soup with Chicken and Sweetbread

A soup made with chicken, sweetbread, veal broth, mace, green onions, turnips, peas, and croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Soup with Chicken and Sweetbread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the chicken as for a fricassee.

  2. Cut the sweetbread into slices and scald the sweetbread.

Make the soup

  1. Add 1 pint of veal broth and a blade of mace.

  2. Add the green onions and turnips to a pot and stew the mixture until the turnips are tender.

  3. Rub the mixture through a tamis cloth.

  4. Add 5 pints of veal broth and bring the soup to a boil.

  5. Add the chicken, sweetbread, and 1 pint of young green peas.

  6. Season to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve with croutons of fried bread.

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. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Turnip + peastop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,350 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Peas + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together804 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexyl acetate (fruity, apple).

  5. Chicken + vealtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-butanedione (buttery, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Stewed until tender, then rubbed through a cloth, they thicken the soup and give it body.
Sweetbread
Adds a rich, delicate texture to the soup as sliced meat.
Veal broth
Forms the liquid base of the soup and carries its flavour.
Young green peas
Add sweetness and a fresh, vegetal flavour to the soup.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture through a tamis cloth. Pressing the cooked turnips and onions through a fine cloth breaks them down into a smooth purée that thickens the broth. Skipping or rushing this step leaves the soup lumpy and thin.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, veal, onion, turnip, peas, bread):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, veal, onion, turnip, peas, bread. 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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