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Soup

Cream of Cottage-cheese Soup

A soup made from cottage cheese, neutralized with baking soda, flavored with onion, lemon rind, mace or nutmeg, served with croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cottage cheese and onion work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 391 recipes. Both carry ethyl butyrate, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Cream of Cottage-cheese Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Make a thin cottage cheese sauce, neutralizing the acid with baking soda.

  2. Reheat the soup with the onion, lemon rind, and mace or nutmeg.

  3. Ensure no flavor predominates; the seasoning should be delicate.

Serve

  1. Serve with croutons.

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. Cottage cheese + oniontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together391 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  2. Onion + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  3. Cottage cheese + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  4. Lemon + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,315 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Onion + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Cottage cheese
Forms the thick, creamy body of the soup.
Baking soda
Neutralizes the cottage cheese's acidity so the sauce is less likely to curdle.
Onion
Adds savory aroma and background flavor to the soup.
Lemon rind
Adds a light citrus aroma without much sourness.
Mace or nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic spice note.

The step that matters

Neutralizing the acid in the cottage cheese. Cottage cheese is acidic, and heating acidic dairy can make its proteins curdle and turn grainy. Baking soda raises the pH, which helps the thin sauce stay smooth when it is heated.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cottage cheese, onion, lemon):

  1. Dillfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cottage cheese, onion, lemon. 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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