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Milk Soup Flavoured with Almonds

A milk soup flavored with almonds, sweetened and served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Milk Soup Flavoured with Almonds

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Cut rounds of bread with a tin cutter and place them on a baking sheet.

  2. Sift caster sugar over the bread and bake at 400°F (200°C) until glazed and lightly browned.

  3. Blanch and peel the almonds, then pound them in a mortar, adding a little milk to prevent oiling.

  4. Rub the pounded almonds through a fine sieve.

Make the soup

  1. Boil the milk, season with salt and sugar, and mix in the pounded almonds without boiling again.

Serve

  1. Place the browned bread in a soup tureen, pour the soup over it, and 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. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Almond + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,800 recipes

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

  3. Almond + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together858 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetylpyrazine (roast).

  4. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

Sweet almonds
Provide the main body and nutty flavour of the soup once pounded and sieved.
Bitter almonds
Add a sharper, more pronounced almond aroma to the soup.
Milk
Carries the almond flavour and gives the soup its liquid, creamy body.
Bread
Soaks up the soup and holds its shape when the soup is poured over it.

The step that matters

Pounding the almonds with a little milk. Almonds release oil as they are crushed, and adding a little milk helps keep the oil emulsified rather than separating into greasy droplets in the soup.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Cocoafits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Almondthe original
  4. Lima beansfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, 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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