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Soup

Potage a LA Reine

A French soup made with chicken, parsley, veal stock, bread, egg yolks, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and veal are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,243 recipes. Both carry 3-butanedione, which smells buttery, creamy. The science ↓

Potage a LA Reine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Draw, wash, and clean the chickens.

Make the soup

  1. Place them in a stew-pan with parsley and boiling veal stock; let it stew for 1 hour.

  2. Remove the fowls and pound the meat to a fine paste in a mortar with the soaked bread and egg yolks.

  3. Rub the mixture through a sieve and add it to the soup, stirring well.

  4. Heat the cream in a pot until it boils, then mix it with the soup.

Serve

  1. Serve the soup 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. Chicken + vealtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-butanedione (buttery, creamy).

  2. Parsley + vealtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,766 recipes

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

  3. Chicken + parsleytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,314 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,765 recipes

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

  5. Chicken + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Chickens
Provide the meat that is pounded into a paste to thicken and flavour the soup.
Crumb of penny loaves
Soaked bread that helps bind the pounded meat and thicken the soup.
Yolks of hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and body to the pounded mixture, helping it thicken the soup.
Rich cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the finished soup a smooth, velvety texture.
Veal stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the chicken and parsley.

The step that matters

Rubbing the pounded mixture through a sieve. Pushing the paste through a sieve breaks up fibres and lumps so the soup becomes smooth rather than grainy. Skipping or rushing this leaves gritty texture in the finished soup.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, veal, egg, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Garlicfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, veal, egg, cream. 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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