Skip to main content
Main

Milk Soup

A soup of boiled onions, turnips, celery, milk, water, wheatmeal, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,418 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Milk Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil the chopped vegetables in the water until tender.

  2. Rub the vegetables through a sieve and return to the saucepan.

  3. Add pepper and salt to taste.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix the wheatmeal smooth in the milk and stir into the soup.

  2. Let the soup simmer for 6 minutes.

  3. Serve.

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. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Provide sweetness and aromatic flavor as the base of the soup.
Turnips
Add body and mild sweetness as they soften and break down into the soup.
Celery
Adds savory, aromatic flavor to the vegetable base.
Milk
Adds creaminess and richness to the soup.
Fine wheatmeal
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when heated in the liquid.

The step that matters

Mixing the wheatmeal smooth in the milk. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps, because the outside of each particle hydrates before the inside can. Whisking it smooth into cold or room-temperature milk first lets the starch disperse evenly, so it thickens the soup without lumps.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, celery, milk, pepper):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, celery, milk, pepper. 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.

More milk soup recipes

Tomato 14Rice 10Bread 8Oyster 6Almond 5Beef 4 See all 78 →

You might also like

Cream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipesCelery CroquettesCelery Croquettes16 recipes