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Beer Soup for Supper

A savory soup made with white beer, red wine, egg yolks, cinnamon, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beer and red wine share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 31 recipes. Both carry 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-one, which smells catty, blackcurrant. The science ↓

Beer Soup for Supper

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a deep saucepan, combine the white beer, red wine, egg yolks, cinnamon, sugar, and salt.

  2. Stir the mixture until it begins to boil.

  3. Serve hot in cups.

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. Beer + red winetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together31 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-one (catty, blackcurrant).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Red wine + cinnamontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together312 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Beer + cinnamontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the warm liquid and give the soup a rich, creamy body as they set with gentle heat.
White beer
Forms the main liquid base and contributes its malty, yeasty aroma to the soup.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour that balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the acidity of the wine and the bitterness of the beer.

The step that matters

Stir until it just begins to boil. Egg yolks thicken with gentle heat but can curdle and turn grainy if overheated. The moment the mixture begins to boil is when it is most at risk, so keep it stirred and watch it closely.

Swap the cinnamon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beer, red wine, egg, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonthe original
  2. Clovefits about as well
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beer, red wine, egg, sugar. 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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