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Cocoa-nut Soup

A soup made with cocoa-nut, rice flour, spices, and stock, finished with cream, soy sauce, lemon juice, sugar, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cocoa-nut Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cocoa-nut

  1. Remove the dark rind from a fresh cocoa-nut and grate it finely.

  2. Weigh the grated cocoa-nut and use 5 oz for the soup.

Make the soup

  1. Simmer the cocoa-nut in 5 pints of stock for 1 hour.

  2. Strain the mixture to remove the cocoa-nut.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix 5 oz of rice flour with ½ cup of cream.

  4. Add mace, cayenne, and salt to the rice flour mixture.

  5. Stir the mixture into the strained stock and cook for an additional 10 minutes.

  6. If desired, substitute the cream with reserved stock and add soy sauce, lemon juice, sugar, and sherry.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

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

  3. Cocoa + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together93 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Cocoa-nut
Gives the soup its characteristic nutty, rich flavour and body.
Rice flour
Thickens the stock so the soup becomes creamy and smooth.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, mellow texture to the soup.
Stock
Forms the savoury base that the cocoa-nut flavour is simmered into.

The step that matters

Stir the rice flour mixture into the strained stock. Rice flour can clump if added directly to hot liquid. Mixing it first with cream, then stirring it in and cooking gently, helps it disperse evenly and thicken the soup smoothly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, cocoa, rice, flour, pepper, cream, sugar):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, cocoa, rice, flour, pepper, cream, sugar. 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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