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Almondegos Soup: a Superior White Soup

A clear white soup made with veal, calf's foot, almonds, and egg, thickened with meatballs and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and almond share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 54 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Almondegos Soup: a Superior White Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. In a large pot, combine the veal, calf's foot, water, mace, sweet herbs, turnip, white pepper, and salt.

  2. Bring to a boil and simmer until done, then strain and skim the broth.

Finish the soup

  1. Add the balls of forced meat and egg balls to the soup.

  2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with lemon juice and the blanched almonds mixed with powdered sugar.

  3. Stir this mixture into the soup and cook until it thickens, avoiding curdling.

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. Turnip + almondtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together54 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Turnip + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together770 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. White pepper + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,658 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the soup and enrich it with fat and richness as they set.
Sweet almonds
Add nutty flavour and body to the soup as they are blended into the liquid.
Veal knuckle and calf's foot
Release gelatin and savoury flavour into the broth as they simmer.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the yolk mixture into the soup. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently, but added to very hot liquid without care they can scramble and curdle. Stir steadily and keep the soup below a rolling boil so it thickens smoothly.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, mace, turnip, meat, egg, lemon, almond):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, mace, turnip, meat, egg, lemon, almond. 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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