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Soup

Modern Cookery

A thickening agent for soup made with rice flour, salt, spices, catsup or wine, and liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,223 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the thickening

  1. Sift the rice flour through a fine sieve and blend it with salt, spices, catsup, or wine.

  2. Gradually add enough liquid to create a smooth batter consistency. Beat the mixture with the back of a spoon until lumps disappear.

Thicken the soup

  1. Bring the soup to a quick boil and stir in the thickening.

  2. Simmer for 10 minutes after adding the thickening.

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. Rice + winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,223 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice flour
Starch that swells when heated and thickens the soup without adding flour taste.

The step that matters

Beat the batter until smooth before adding it to the soup. Starch lumps form when dry flour meets liquid unevenly and hydrate on the outside. Beating until smooth lets the granules disperse so they thicken evenly once heated.

“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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