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White Soup

A creamy veal and ham soup thickened with flour and served with vermicelli.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,108 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

White Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Gently stew the veal, ham, onions, thyme, mace, and cloves until the stock is rich.

  2. Let it cool, then remove the fat.

Finish and serve

  1. Reheat the stock in a clean saucepan when ready to serve.

  2. In a bowl, mix the flour, cream, cayenne pepper, and salt.

  3. When the soup boils, pour in the flour mixture and let it boil for a few minutes.

  4. Strain the soup through a sieve into a bowl.

  5. Heat the strained soup just before serving and add vermicelli.

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. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Thyme + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal knuckle
Releases gelatin and savory flavor into the stock as it stews slowly.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic depth to the stock as they soften during stewing.
Fine flour
Thickens the cream mixture so the soup becomes smoother and fuller bodied.
Fresh cream
Adds richness and body, giving the soup a smooth, velvety texture.
Ham
Contributes salty, smoky meat flavor to the stock.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture to the boiling soup. Flour thickens only when heated, but if it is added to soup that is not boiling, or stirred poorly, it can clump. Pouring it into a boil while stirring disperses the starch so it thickens evenly, and boiling a few minutes cooks out the raw flour taste.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, ham, onion, thyme, clove, flour, cream):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, ham, onion, thyme, clove, flour, 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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