Skip to main content
Main

Celery Soup

A creamy soup of boiled rice, milk, and celery, finished with butter, salt, pepper, and optional mace, served with bread dice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Celery Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine boiled rice and boiling milk in a large pot.

  2. Add finely chopped celery and cover the pot.

  3. Let it stew over boiling water until the celery is tender.

  4. Season the soup with butter, coarse sea salt, white pepper, and mace if desired.

Finish and serve

  1. Place beaten eggs in a tureen and pour the hot soup over them.

  2. Garnish with crisp bread dice 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Rice + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,169 recipes

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

  5. White pepper + macetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Breaks down into the soup, giving it body and a thicker, creamy texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base, adding richness and a smooth, creamy mouthfeel.
Celery
Provides the main vegetable flavour and aroma once softened by stewing.
Eggs
Enrich and thicken the hot soup as they set gently, adding body and richness.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot soup over the beaten eggs. Eggs thicken only gently when heated. Pouring the soup in slowly while whisking, or with the eggs already in the tureen, helps them warm gradually and prevents curdling into lumps.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, milk, celery, butter, white pepper, egg, bread):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, celery, butter, white pepper, 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.

More celery soup recipes

Cream 7Creamy 3Spanish 3 See all 210 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes