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Vegetable Soup

A cucumber and lettuce soup with peas, onions, herbs, butter, flour, and sugar simmered in stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Cucumber and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice the cucumbers.

  2. Chop the hearts of the lettuces.

  3. Add the mint, onions, parsley, pepper, salt, and green peas.

Cook the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Add the vegetables, cooking slowly for 30 minutes without water.

  3. Pour in 2 quarts of boiling water.

  4. Simmer for 2 hours.

  5. Mix the flour with a little water.

  6. Add the flour mixture to the soup along with the sugar.

  7. Boil for an additional 15 minutes 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Mint + peastop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Cucumber + minttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together884 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Green peas
Add body and natural sweetness, thickening the soup slightly as they break down.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the vegetables as they cook.
Flour
Thickens the soup, giving it a smoother, more body-rich texture.
Stock
Provides the main liquid and savoury flavour base for the soup.

The step that matters

Cooking the vegetables slowly without water. Gentle cooking in their own juices with butter softens the vegetables and concentrates their flavour. Too much heat can scorch them before the liquid is added.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, lettuce, mint, parsley, peas, butter, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, lettuce, mint, parsley, peas, butter, pepper. 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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