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Egg Soup

A savory soup made with onions, water, milk, flour, egg yolks, and served with bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Egg Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Slice the onions and fry them in a little butter until light brown.

  2. Add 3 pints of water and reduce to 1 quart by boiling.

  3. Strain out the onions and set them aside.

Thicken and serve

  1. Boil the liquid and mix 1 tablespoon of flour with ¼ cup of milk.

  2. Add the flour mixture, salt, pepper, and sugar to the boiling liquid and stir until thickened.

  3. Remove from heat and gradually stir in the yolks of 4 eggs.

  4. Serve in a soup tureen with pulled bread or dried roll.

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

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Egg yolks
Enrich the soup and thicken it as they set gently with the warm broth.
Flour
Thickens the milk-based mixture so the broth becomes lightly body-rich.
Onions
Add savoury flavour through browning in butter before the water is added.
Bread or dried roll
Adds body and soaks up broth, giving the soup more substance when served.

The step that matters

Gradually stir in the egg yolks off the heat. If yolks meet very hot liquid or are added all at once, they can scramble into bits instead of smoothly enriching the soup. Removing the pan from heat and adding them slowly keeps them silky.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

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