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Julienne Soup

A vegetable soup made with julienned carrots, turnips, parsnips, cabbage, celery, leeks, potatoes, onions, lettuce, chervil, sorrel, butter, sugar, salt, and broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Julienne Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut all vegetables into very fine, narrow strips, using equal quantities of each.

Cook

  1. In a stewpan, combine the vegetables with a good lump of butter, a little sugar, and coarse sea salt.

  2. Cover and let them stew for a few minutes.

  3. Add broth and boil until all vegetables are thoroughly cooked.

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. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together165 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Provides bulk, sweetness and colour to the soup as the strips cook through.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the vegetables stew gently in the pan.
Broth
Supplies the liquid in which the vegetables finish cooking into a soup.
Potatoes
Softens as it cooks, adding body and starch that thickens the soup slightly.

The step that matters

Stewing before adding broth. Covering the vegetables and stewing them gently in butter draws out moisture and softens them evenly, so they cook through properly once the broth is added and boiled.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, parsnip, cabbage, celery, leek, potato):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Jerusalem artichokefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, parsnip, cabbage, celery, leek, potato. 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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