Skip to main content
Main

Julienne Soup

A vegetable soup with onions, turnip, carrot, celery, peas, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Julienne Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Fry the shredded onions in butter until brown.

  2. Add mace, salt, and pepper, then a spoonful of stock.

  3. Rub flour smooth with a little butter and fry with the onions.

  4. Strain the mixture through a colander and add more stock as desired.

Add the vegetables

  1. Boil the turnip, carrot, celery, and green peas in a little water until tender.

  2. Add both the water and vegetables to the soup.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Browning in the butter builds the savoury, sweet base flavour of the soup.
Flour
Frying it with butter and thickens the stock, giving the soup body.
Butter
Fat that carries the onion flavour and helps the flour cook smooth.
Turnip
Adds bulk and mild sweetness as it softens in the soup.
Carrot
Softens to add sweetness and colour to the soup.

The step that matters

Rub the flour smooth with butter before frying. Flour added directly to hot liquid or fat clumps; rubbing it smooth with butter lets it disperse evenly, and frying cooks off its raw starchy taste before stock is added.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, pepper, flour, turnip, carrot, celery):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, pepper, flour, turnip, carrot, celery. 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 julienne soup recipes

You might also like