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Potato Soup

A simple potato soup made by boiling potatoes, mashing, adding to stock, sieving, seasoning, simmering, and serving with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Potato Soup

Why it works: Potato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,305 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Potato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil or steam the potatoes until very dry.

  2. Mash the potatoes smoothly, ensuring no lumps remain.

Make the soup

  1. Gradually add the mashed potatoes to the boiling stock.

  2. Pass the mixture through a sieve.

  3. Season with salt and pepper.

  4. Simmer for 5 minutes.

  5. Skim the surface well.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried 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.

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. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mealy potatoes
Their starch thickens the stock and gives the soup its body and creamy texture.
Stock
Forms the main liquid and carries the savoury flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Gradually add the mashed potatoes to the boiling stock. Potato starch clumps when it hits hot liquid in one mass, forming lumps that a sieve will not fully remove. Adding the purée in small amounts while stirring disperses the starch evenly, giving a smooth, uniformly thick 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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