Skip to main content
Main

Milk Soup

A simple soup made with rice, milk, salt, sugar, bay leaf, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Milk Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Wash the rice well in several waters and soak it for 2 to 3 hours in the last water.

  2. Put the rice with the water into a saucepan and boil until the rice absorbs the water.

Cook the soup

  1. In another saucepan, boil the milk.

  2. When the milk boils, pour it over the rice and stir well for 30 minutes.

  3. Add the salt, sugar, and bay leaf, then let it boil for another 30 minutes.

  4. When the rice is done, it should be soft but not mashed.

  5. Remove the bay leaf.

Finish and serve

  1. In a bowl, break the egg yolks and add the cold milk drop by drop, mixing with a spoon.

  2. When the milk has stopped boiling, add the egg mixture and stir.

  3. Serve hot.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Carolina rice
Starch that softens during long simmering and thickens the milk into a soup.
Milk
Liquid base that cooks the rice and gives the soup its creamy body.
Egg yolks
Enrich the soup and add richness and body when stirred in off the boil.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk mixture. Egg yolks can scramble and curdle if they meet boiling liquid. Mixing them with cold milk first and adding them after the milk has stopped boiling helps keep the soup smooth.

“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.

More milk soup recipes

Tomato 14Rice 10Bread 8Oyster 6Almond 5Beef 4 See all 78 →

You might also like

Rice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesSteamed RiceSteamed Rice48 recipesRice Griddle CakesRice Griddle Cakes28 recipesRice and Cheese CasseroleRice and Cheese Casserole23 recipes