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Wine and Beer Soups

A soup made with wine or beer, water, sugar, flour, butter, lemon peel, cinnamon, egg yolks, and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Wine and Beer Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. In a pot, combine the white wine (or beer) and water.

  2. Sweeten to taste with white sugar.

  3. In a separate pan, fry the flour with butter until very brown.

  4. Pour the wine and water mixture over the browned flour and boil for a few minutes with lemon peel and cinnamon.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the egg yolks and slowly add the boiling soup while stirring continuously to prevent curdling.

  2. Add finely cut toasted bread to the soup and serve hot.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. White wine + buttertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

White wine or beer
Provides the liquid base and acidity that gives the soup its character.
Flour
Browned in butter, it adds body and a toasty, nutty flavour to the broth.
Butter
Fat that carries the browning of the flour and adds richness.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the soup as they set gently in the hot liquid.
Toasted bread
Adds texture and absorbs some of the broth, giving the soup substance.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling soup to the egg yolks. If the hot liquid is poured in quickly, the yolks scramble instead of thickening smoothly. Adding it slowly while stirring constantly tempers the yolks so they blend evenly into the soup.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, sugar, flour, butter, cinnamon, egg, bread):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, sugar, flour, butter, cinnamon, egg, bread. 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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