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Soup with Chicken and Sweetbread

A chicken soup flavored with sweetbread, veal broth, mace, green onions, turnips, peas, and served with fried bread croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Soup with Chicken and Sweetbread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the chicken as for a fricassee.

  2. Scald the sweetbread slices.

Make the broth base

  1. In a pot, combine 2 cups of veal broth and a blade of mace; bring to a boil.

  2. Add the green onions and turnips; stew until tender.

  3. Rub the mixture through a fine cloth to create a pulp.

  4. Add 5 cups of veal broth to the pulp and bring to a boil.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the chicken, sweetbread, and green peas; season with salt and pepper.

  2. Serve hot with croutons of fried 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. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Turnip + peastop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,350 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Peas + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together804 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexyl acetate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbread
Provides a tender, delicate texture and rich flavour to the soup.
Turnips
Stew down to a pulp that thickens and sweetens the broth.
Green peas
Add a soft texture and a fresh, sweet flavour.
Veal broth
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture through a fine cloth. Stewed turnips and onions must be pressed into a smooth pulp; leftover lumps or fibres leave the soup grainy and uneven in texture.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, veal, onion, turnip, peas, pepper, bread):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, veal, onion, turnip, peas, pepper, 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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