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Soup

Potage a L'oseille Et Aux Petits Pois

A French soup of sorrel, peas, onion, carrot, turnip, and butter, served with bread or rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 179 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potage a L'oseille Et Aux Petits Pois

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and cook the sorrel covered until it becomes a puree, adding a little hot water if necessary to prevent burning.

  2. Add the boiling water, green peas, onion, carrot, and turnip.

  3. Cook for about one hour.

  4. Cut the bread into the saucepan and let it boil for a few minutes, or substitute with rice cooked in the broth.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Sorrel + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together27,232 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sorrel
Breaks down into a puree that gives the soup its tangy, green body.
Green peas
Soften during long simmering to add body and mild sweetness.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the base as the sorrel cooks.
Turnip
Softens into the broth, adding body and a subtle earthy flavor.

The step that matters

Cook the sorrel covered in butter until it becomes a puree. Sorrel can scorch in the dry pan before it breaks down. Keeping the lid on traps steam so it softens evenly, and adding a little hot water prevents burning.

Flavor stand-ins for the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sorrel, butter, onion, carrot, turnip, bread):

  1. Lentilsbetter flavor fit
  2. Beansbetter flavor fit
  3. Chestnutbetter flavor fit
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sorrel, butter, onion, carrot, turnip, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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