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Tomato Bisque

A creamy tomato soup thickened with flour and milk, seasoned with bay leaf, onion, parsley, cloves, sugar, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Tomato Bisque

Why it works: Olive and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,539 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Tomato Bisque

Ingredients

Directions

Make the white sauce

  1. In a double boiler, mix olive oil and flour until smooth.

  2. Add milk and bring to a boil.

Prepare the tomato base

  1. In a separate pot, combine strained tomato juice with bay leaf, onion, parsley, and cloves.

  2. Season the tomato juice and bring to a simmer.

  3. Just before serving, stir in sugar and baking soda into the tomato juice.

Combine and finish

  1. Combine the thickened milk with the tomato juice and remove from heat.

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. Olive + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,539 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  5. Tomato + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,398 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Olive oil
Carries the flour and helps form a smooth base for the white sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as its starch swells with heat.
Milk
Forms the creamy body of the bisque when combined with the thickened base.
Strained tomato juice
Provides the main liquid, flavor, and acidity of the bisque.
Baking soda
Neutralizes some of the tomato's acidity, which can cause the milk to curdle.

The step that matters

Combine the thickened milk with the tomato juice. Tomato is acidic and can curdle milk when the two meet at high heat. Adding baking soda to the tomato just before combining helps neutralize acid, and removing from heat promptly limits curdling and keeps the texture smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (olive, flour, milk, tomato, parsley, clove, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Eggplantfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, flour, milk, tomato, parsley, clove, sugar. 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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