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Wine Soup

A warm soup made with white wine, water, arrowroot, lemon rind, cinnamon, almonds, eggs, sugar, cream, cloves, nutmeg, salt, flour, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Wine Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a pot, combine the sauterne and water; bring to a boil.

  2. Thicken the boiling mixture with arrowroot, stirring constantly.

  3. Add lemon rind, cinnamon stick, chopped almonds, and egg yolks to a tureen.

  4. Pour the boiling mixture into the tureen while stirring.

Prepare the flavoured broth

  1. In another pot, boil 1.5 pints of water with lemon rind, cloves, and nutmeg for 5 minutes.

  2. Add 1 pint of white wine to the boiled mixture.

  3. Blend flour and butter, then gradually add a little of the boiled soup to it.

  4. Beat in the yolks of 3 eggs and 1 whole egg into the remaining soup, whipping constantly for 5 minutes.

  5. Season with salt and sugar, then stir in the cream before serving.

Garnish

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff and form into small balls to garnish the soup.

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. Arrowroot + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Arrowroot + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together166 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the hot liquid into a smooth, glossy body without clouding it.
Egg yolks
Enrich the soup and thicken it gently when whisked into hot liquid.
Sauterne
Provides the wine base and its acidity and aroma to the soup.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the soup a softer, rounder texture.
Flour
Helps thicken the soup when blended with butter before being added.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the acidity of the wine.

The step that matters

Whisking the egg yolks into the hot soup. Egg yolks scramble if they meet very hot liquid directly. Adding a little hot soup first and whisking constantly lets them warm gradually and thicken smoothly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, arrowroot, cinnamon, almond, egg, sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, arrowroot, cinnamon, almond, egg, sugar, cream. 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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