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Soup

Tomato Cream Soup

A tomato soup thickened with flour and butter, served with toasted bread squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Tomato Cream Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Slice the onion and fry it in butter until brown.

  2. Add the canned tomatoes, flour, butter, salt, sugar, hot water, and hot milk.

  3. Boil for fifteen minutes.

  4. Rub the mixture through a sieve.

Serve

  1. Serve with toasted bread cut into small squares.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Frying in butter until brown adds savoury, slightly caramelised flavour to the soup.
Canned tomatoes
Form the base of the soup, providing the main body and tomato flavour.
Flour
Thickens the liquid so the soup becomes smooth and creamy rather than watery.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour when frying the onion and enriching the soup.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the acidity of the tomatoes.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a sieve. Pressing the cooked tomato and onion through a sieve removes seeds and skins and breaks down solids, giving the smooth texture the soup depends on.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, flour, sugar, milk):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, flour, sugar, milk. 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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