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Soup

Sour Egg Soup

A light soup thickened with water or sour cream, seasoned with vinegar, salt, bay leaf, lemon rind, and finished with eggs and sour cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and 44,316 recipes mention both. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Sour Egg Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Prepare a light thickening with water or sour cream as needed for the soup.

  2. Season with vinegar, bay leaf, coarse sea salt, and grated lemon rind.

Serve

  1. Before serving, carefully break two eggs per person into the soup, keeping the yolk and whites together.

  2. Cook the eggs until hard.

  3. Add sour cream to taste before serving.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  2. Vinegar + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together7,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Cream + eggtop 24% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Cream + vinegartop 25% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together4,064 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Cream + lemontop 30% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Lemon and egg share little aroma chemistry, yet 44,316 recipes mention both: they likely 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
Set in the hot soup to form whole cooked portions that hold their shape.
Sour cream
Adds richness and a creamy body to the thickened soup.
Vinegar
Provides the sour acidity that defines the soup's flavor.

The step that matters

Breaking the eggs into the soup. Eggs dropped in carefully keep their yolk and whites intact and set in place. Added too fast or too roughly, the whites scatter into loose strands and cloud the broth.

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

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

  1. Strawberrybetter flavor fit
  2. Raspberrybetter flavor fit
  3. Vanillabetter flavor fit
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, vinegar, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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