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Italian Soup

A tomato and pepper soup with horseradish, macaroni rings, and a buttery base.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,784 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Italian Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Cook the green peppers and onion in butter for five minutes.

  2. Add flour, stock, and tomatoes; let simmer for fifteen minutes.

  3. Rub the mixture through a sieve.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, and cayenne.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, add horseradish, vinegar, and previously cooked macaroni rings.

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. Horseradish + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  4. Flour + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 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

Butter
Fat that softens the green peppers and onion and carries their flavor into the soup.
Flour
Thickens the stock and tomatoes into a smoother, body-rich soup.
Tomatoes
Provide the main body, acidity and tomato flavor of the soup.
Macaroni rings
Add starch and bite to the finished soup as a pasta garnish.
Grated horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent aroma that fades somewhat with heat, so it is added late.

The step that matters

Just before serving, add horseradish, vinegar, and previously cooked macaroni rings.. Horseradish loses its pungent aroma and sharpness when heated for long, and pasta keeps softening in hot liquid. Adding them at the end keeps the flavor bright and the macaroni firm.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, horseradish, onion, vinegar):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, horseradish, onion, vinegar. 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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