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White Soup

A light chicken soup thickened with bread crumbs, milk, 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 milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

White Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the bread crumbs in the milk.

  2. Add the milk and bread crumbs to the chicken stock.

  3. Beat the egg yolks with salt in a bowl.

  4. Stir the egg yolks into the soup.

  5. Optionally, beat the meat from the fowl and add it to the soup.

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 + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Chicken + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup and carries its flavor.
Bread crumbs
Thicken the soup and give it a soft, smooth body.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the bread crumbs for thickening.
Egg yolks
Enrich the soup and add richness and a smoother texture when stirred in.

The step that matters

Stir the egg yolks into the soup. Egg yolks thicken when heated, so adding them to very hot soup can curdle or scramble them. Stirring them in gradually, with the soup off the boil, helps keep the texture smooth.

“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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