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Potage Printanier, or Spring Soup

A light soup of green peas, lettuce, onions, herbs, butter, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chervil and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 396 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potage Printanier, or Spring Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the vegetable base

  1. In a clean saucepan, combine chervil, lettuces, onions, parsley, butter, and 1 pint of water.

  2. Simmer until the vegetables are tender.

  3. Season with salt and pepper.

Finish the soup

  1. Strain the vegetables and add two-thirds of the cooking liquid to the stock.

  2. Beat the egg yolks with the remaining third of the liquid.

  3. Heat briefly over the fire, then add to the soup along with the strained vegetables just before serving.

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. Chervil + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together396 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chervil + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together774 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Green peas
Give the soup its main body and fresh, sweet pea flavour.
Lettuces
Soften into the base, adding gentle sweetness and body to the soup.
Onions
Build savoury depth as they soften in the butter and water.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour from the vegetables into the soup.
Egg yolks
Thicken the soup slightly and add richness and smoothness when gently heated.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup and carries its savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble and curdle if the mixture gets too hot. Heat them gently, briefly, and keep the soup below a simmer while stirring.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, chervil, lettuce, parsley, butter, egg, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, chervil, lettuce, parsley, butter, egg, pepper. 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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