Skip to main content
Main

Noodle Soup with Potatoes

A soup of boiled potatoes and thin noodle strips in butter and sour cream broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Noodle Soup with Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup base

  1. In a kettle of boiling water, add ½ cup of butter and ¼ teaspoon of salt.

  2. Drop in the sliced potatoes and cook until tender.

Make the noodle dough

  1. In a bowl, mix 2 eggs, ½ cup of butter, 3 tablespoons of sour cream, and enough flour to form a dough.

  2. Roll the dough very thin and cut it into narrow strips.

Cook and serve

  1. Drop the strips into the kettle and boil for 30 minutes.

  2. Serve hot.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Potato + walnuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Walnut + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + potatotop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure to the noodles.
Flour
Forms the gluten structure that lets the dough be rolled thin and hold its shape.
Potatoes
Soften into the broth, adding body and starch to the soup.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and tang, making the dough tender.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel in both the broth and dough.

The step that matters

Rolling the dough very thin. Thin dough cooks through evenly in the boiling water. Thick dough stays raw in the center and turns gummy or doughy on the outside, so the strips need to be rolled and cut narrow.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Potatothe original

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

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes