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Cheese Soup

A creamy milk-based soup flavored with mace, butter, flour, 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 bowl, rub the butter and flour together, then wet with a little cold milk.

  3. Add the butter and flour mixture to the hot milk along with pepper and salt.

  4. When cooked, beat the egg yolks lightly and add them along with the cheese.

  5. Cook for 1 minute longer before serving.

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
Thickens the milk into a smooth, creamy soup when cooked with the butter.
Egg yolks
Enrich the soup and add body and richness when stirred in at the end.
Cheese
Adds savory flavor and richness to the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor, and coats the flour so it blends smoothly.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks can scramble if they meet very hot liquid directly. Beating them lightly and adding them after the soup is cooked, then cooking only briefly, helps keep the soup smooth and creamy.

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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