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Soupe Blanche

A light soup made with celery, butter, chicken stock, a young fowl, salt, spices, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and chicken are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,375 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Soupe Blanche

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the celery thinly.

  2. Stew the sliced celery in butter until tender.

Make the soup

  1. Add the stewed celery to chicken stock with the young fowl, salt, and spices.

  2. Cook until well done and ready to serve.

  3. Before serving, stir in the yolks of two eggs.

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. Celery + chickentop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Butter + chickentop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Celery + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,049 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Chicken + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,991 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Stewed in butter until tender, it becomes soft and gives the soup its main vegetable flavour and body.
Butter
Gently stewing the celery in butter carries fat-soluble flavour into the vegetables and softens them.
Chicken stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup and carries the flavour of the fowl and seasonings.
Egg yolks
Stirred in at the end, they thicken and enrich the soup, giving it a smooth, creamy body.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can curdle or scramble if the soup is at a hard boil. Remove the pot from the heat or keep it barely simmering while stirring the yolks in slowly.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, chicken, egg):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, chicken, 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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