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Soup

Cock-a-Leekie Soup

A Scottish soup of boiled fowl and leeks in stock, seasoned with pepper and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Leek and pepper work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 965 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cock-a-Leekie Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the leeks well, scald them in boiling water if old, remove the roots and part of the heads, and cut into 1-inch lengths.

Make the soup

  1. Put the fowl into the stock with half of the leeks and simmer gently.

  2. After 30 minutes, add the remaining leeks and continue to simmer for 3 to 4 hours.

  3. Skim the soup carefully and season to taste.

Serve

  1. Remove the fowl, carve it neatly, and place the pieces in a tureen, pouring the thick leek soup over them.

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. Leek + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together965 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

Fowl
Gives flavour to the stock and becomes tender meat as it simmers slowly for hours.
Leeks
Add their mild onion flavour and, as they cook down, thicken the soup and give it body.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the fowl and leeks throughout the soup.

The step that matters

Simmering the soup gently. A gentle simmer keeps the fowl tender and the broth clear, while a hard boil toughens the meat and breaks up the soup.

“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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