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Potage a LA Creme d’Orge

A creamy pearl-barley soup flavored with butter, stock, flour, eggs, and finished with cream and asparagus heads.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and asparagus share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 44 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Potage a LA Creme d’Orge

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Stir the flour into the melted butter until well mixed.

  3. Add the white stock and bring to a boil.

  4. Once boiling, add the pearl barley and cook for about 2 hours.

  5. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve back into the stewpan.

  6. Let it simmer for about 10 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove from heat and stir in the beaten egg yolks carefully.

  2. Do not let the soup boil after adding the eggs to prevent curdling.

  3. Add the cream and stir until thoroughly mixed.

  4. Serve with asparagus heads.

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. Barley + asparagustop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together44 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + asparagustop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together936 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + barleytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together582 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Enriches the soup with fat and adds a rich, savoury flavour.
Flour
Thickens the butter and stock mixture so the soup becomes body-rich and smooth.
Pearl barley
Softens during long cooking and adds body and a chewy texture to the soup.
Egg yolks
Thicken the finished soup gently and add richness and smoothness.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when gently heated but curdle if the soup boils, so the soup must be removed from heat before stirring them in and kept below a boil.

Swap the asparagus

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, barley, egg):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Asparagusthe original
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, barley, egg. 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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