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Dinner Monday

A vegetable soup served with a baked potato, poached egg, side salad, and fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,097 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Dinner Monday

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop and combine the fresh vegetables to make a soup.

Cook

  1. Bake the potato in its skin at 400°F (200°C) until the skin is crisp.

  2. Poach the egg in water at 160°F (70°C) for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with endives, lettuce, and crisp celery.

  2. Add dates, figs, olives, or grapes as a side.

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. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together484 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Potato
Bakes into a fluffy interior under a crisp, browned skin.
Egg
Sets into a soft, tender coating when poached gently in hot water.

The step that matters

Poaching the egg at 160°F (70°C). At this low, steady temperature the white sets gently while the yolk stays runny. Water that is too hot toughens the white and can tear the egg apart.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, carrot, spinach, parsnip, celery, potato, egg):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, carrot, spinach, parsnip, celery, potato, egg. 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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