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Milk Soup, the Dutch Way

A warm milk soup flavored with cinnamon, sugar, bread, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Milk Soup, the Dutch Way

Ingredients

Directions

Make the milk

  1. Boil the milk with cinnamon and sugar.

Soak the bread

  1. Place slices in a dish and pour the hot milk over them.

  2. Set the dish over a low heat to simmer until the bread is soft.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the egg yolks and mix with a little of the milk.

  2. Stir the egg mixture into the soup 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the soup and softens the bread as it simmers.
Egg yolks
Thicken the soup gently and add richness when stirred in.
Bread
Absorbs the hot milk and becomes soft, giving the soup body.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and a mild caramel flavor to the milk.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg mixture into the soup. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can scramble if the soup is too hot or boiling when they are added. Mixing them first with a little warm milk helps them blend smoothly.

Swap the cinnamon

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

  1. Cinnamonthe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, bread, egg, butter. 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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