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Brabant Broth

A green soup made with white stock, spinach, sorrel, and a creamy egg yolk mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 204 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Brabant Broth

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a clean three-quart saucepan, combine the stock, spinach, and sorrel.

  2. Stew the mixture until the greens are tender, adding pepper, salt, and sugar.

Finish and serve

  1. In a bowl, beat the cream or milk with the egg yolks.

  2. Just before serving, mix the cream mixture into 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. Spinach + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together204 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Sorrel + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together419 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Sorrel + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together235 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the broth into a smooth, creamy texture when gently heated.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and a mild, smooth body to the soup.
Spinach
Provides the main green flavor and body as it softens in the stock.
White stock
Forms the liquid base that carries all the other flavors.

The step that matters

Mix the cream mixture into the soup just before serving. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble if they are overheated, so the soup should be hot but not boiling when the yolk mixture is stirred in.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sorrel, pepper, sugar, cream, egg):

  1. Spinachthe original
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Chivefits less well
  4. Asparagusfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sorrel, pepper, sugar, cream, egg. 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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