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Soup

Hers Soup

A vegetable soup made with butter, onions, celery, turnips, carrots, salt, pepper, and clear soup or water, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot 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 ↓

Hers Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the chopped onions, celery, turnips, and carrots, along with salt and pepper.

  3. Steam the vegetables for 30 minutes, ensuring they do not burn.

  4. Pour in the clear soup or meat water and cook gently until the vegetables are soft.

  5. Thicken the soup slightly with flour.

  6. Serve with toasted bread.

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. Celery + carrottop 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. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 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

Butter
Fat that softens the vegetables and carries flavour in the soup base.
Onions
Aromatic base that adds sweetness and savoury depth as they soften.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the soup as they cook down.
Flour
Starch that thickens the soup slightly when stirred into the liquid.

The step that matters

Steaming the vegetables without burning. Covered gentle heat softens the vegetables and draws out their flavour. If the butter and vegetables get too hot, the solids can scorch and taste bitter, spoiling the soup.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, celery, turnip, carrot, pepper, meat, flour. 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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