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Potato Flour Soup

A soup thickened with potato flour, made from gravy soup and optional egg yolks, milk, sugar, and orange‑flower water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Potato Flour Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Bring 3 pints of gravy soup to a boil.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix ½ pint of cold soup with 6 tablespoons of potato flour.

  3. Stir the potato flour mixture into the boiling soup, moving the pot to the side.

  4. Return the pot to the heat and stir until thickened, about 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Potato + orangetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together537 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Potato flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells in the hot liquid, giving body.
Gravy soup
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens and flavours the dish.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the boiling soup. Potato flour clumps when it hits hot liquid unless it is first smoothed into cold soup and added while the pot is off the direct heat and being stirred. Lumps form if it is dumped in or left to sit, and the starch only thickens fully when the soup is brought back to heat and stirred until it is smooth and thick.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, flour, butter, egg, milk, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, flour, butter, egg, milk, sugar. 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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