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A Cheap Family White Soup

A clear soup made from veal, ham or bacon, herbs, onion, lemon peel, mace, water, thickened with arrowroot, cream, and milk, served with toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Cheap Family White Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. In a stewpan, combine veal, ham or bacon, herbs, onion, lemon peel, mace, and water.

  2. Cover and simmer gently for 2 hours.

  3. Remove the veal and strain the soup.

Thicken and serve

  1. Blend arrowroot with cream and stir into new milk.

  2. Add this mixture to the soup and season with salt.

  3. Simmer for 10 minutes and serve with sippets of toast.

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. Lemon + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + arrowroottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together340 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Veal + hamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,264 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Onion + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the soup into a smooth, velvety body as it heats.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.
New milk
Adds moisture and mild sweetness, making the soup creamy and pale.
Veal knuckle
Releases gelatin and savory flavor into the water during long simmering.
Ham or bacon
Contributes salty, smoky depth to the broth.

The step that matters

Stirring the arrowroot mixture into the soup. Arrowroot must be blended smoothly with cream first and then stirred in while the soup is hot. Added as lumps or left unstirred, it clumps instead of thickening evenly, and simmering afterward keeps the starch-thickened body uniform.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, ham, onion, lemon, arrowroot, cream, milk):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, ham, onion, lemon, arrowroot, cream, milk. 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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