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White Soup

A chicken soup with rice, vegetables, eggs, cream, and toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

White Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil the chickens in 5 quarts of water until thoroughly cooked.

  2. Remove the chickens and reserve the broth.

  3. Skim off all grease from the broth.

  4. Add the carrot, celery, parsley, salt, cayenne pepper, and onions with 4 cloves stuck in each onion.

  5. Boil until the rice is soft enough to thicken the soup without flour.

  6. Strain the soup.

Finish the soup

  1. Grind the chicken finely.

  2. Mash the yolks of the eggs until smooth.

  3. Mix the mashed yolks with the ground chicken.

  4. Add the chicken mixture to the soup.

  5. Boil for about 15 minutes.

  6. Boil the cream.

  7. Pour the boiled cream into the soup.

Serve

  1. Fry pieces of toast in butter.

  2. Place the fried toast in a tureen.

  3. Pour the soup over the toast.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 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

Chickens
Provide the meat and flavour that form the body of the broth.
Rice
Softens as it cooks and thickens the soup without flour.
Egg yolks
Mashed into the chicken, they enrich and help thicken the soup.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the finished soup.
Celery
Adds aromatic flavour to the broth as it simmers.

The step that matters

Boil the rice until soft. The rice must cook fully so it breaks down and thickens the soup. Undercooked rice leaves the soup thin and gritty, and the soup cannot rely on flour to thicken it.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, rice, onion, carrot, parsley, celery, egg):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, rice, onion, carrot, parsley, celery, 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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