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Cream of Cheese Soup

A creamy cheese soup made with milk, mace, flour, butter, egg yolks, and grated 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 ↓

Cream of Cheese Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

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

  2. Make a sauce with the flour, salt, pepper, butter, and some of the milk.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the beaten egg yolks and cook for 1 minute.

  2. Stir in the cheese and 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. 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

Flour
Starch thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as it heats.
Egg yolks
Proteins set when heated, thickening the soup and adding richness.
Cheese
Adds savoury flavour and body as it melts into the soup.
Butter
Fat carries flavour and helps form a smooth sauce with the flour.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the sauce and cheese are combined into.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolk proteins set when hot and can curdle into lumps if the soup is too hot. Keep the heat gentle and stir while the yolks are added and cooked.

Swap the mace

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

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

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