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Soup

Chicory and Spinach

A simple soup made from chicory, spinach, optional meat, and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicory and spinach share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chicory and Spinach

serves 12 to 15

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare chicory and spinach as desired, with or without meat.

  2. If using preserved julienne, empty a 1-liter bottle into a pot.

Make the soup

  1. Add 2 liters of boiling water and a pinch of coarse sea salt. Stir and serve as a soup for 12 to 15 people.

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. Chicory + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together20 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Spinach + meattop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together263 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Chicory + meattop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicory
Provides the main leafy body and a slightly bitter flavor to the soup.
Spinach
Adds leafy bulk, color and a mild, earthy flavor to the broth.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicory, meat):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicory, meat. 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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