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Milk Soup. Another Way.

A milk soup flavored with cinnamon, bay leaves, almonds, lemon, and served with toasted French bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Milk Soup. Another Way.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the milk and almonds

  1. Heat the milk with cinnamon, bay leaves, salt, and sugar.

  2. Blanch the almonds.

  3. Grind the blanched almonds into a paste in a marble mortar.

Make the soup

  1. Mix the almond paste with some milk gradually.

  2. Add grated lemon peel and lemon juice to the mixture.

  3. Strain the mixture through a coarse sieve.

  4. Combine the strained mixture with the heated milk.

  5. Let the soup boil.

Prepare and serve

  1. Slice the French bread.

  2. Dry the sliced bread before the fire.

  3. Soak the bread slightly in the milk.

  4. Place the soaked bread at the bottom of a tureen.

  5. Pour the soup over the bread.

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. Cinnamon + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Sweet almonds
Provide the main body and nutty flavour of the soup when ground into a paste.
New milk
Forms the liquid base of the soup and carries the flavourings.
French bread
Soaks up the soup, giving it body and a soft texture when served.
Lemon peel
Adds aromatic citrus fragrance that brightens the sweet milk base.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aromatic flavour to the heated milk.

The step that matters

Letting the soup boil. Once the almond paste and milk are combined, boiling must be controlled, since milk scorches and can curdle when overheated, affecting smoothness and taste.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cinnamon, sugar, almond, bread):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon, sugar, almond, bread. 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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