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Cheese Soup

A milk soup thickened with flour, flavored with mace, enriched with egg yolks and cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Cheese Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the milk with the mace, then remove the mace.

  2. In a separate pan, make a sauce by combining the milk, butter, and flour.

  3. Season the sauce with pepper and salt.

  4. Once cooked, add the beaten egg yolks and cook for 1 minute.

  5. Stir in the grated cheese and 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the soup and the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so the soup has body.
Egg yolks
Enriches the soup and thickens it gently when cooked.
Grated cheese
Adds rich savoury flavour and melts into the soup.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken by coagulating when heated. If the sauce is too hot when they go in, or they are cooked too long, they can scramble and turn grainy. Add them once the sauce is cooked and cook gently.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, flour, egg, butter, cheese, pepper):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

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

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